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Infraction...what is it?

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abbyscuito Posts: 54 Forumite

26 August 2011 at 11:29PM in Site feedback and Forum Help

Who uses the word infraction...maybe it's a Scrabble word..it's a terrible no meaning word really...Anybody in MSE care to explain and/or come up with a better word?

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elsien Posts: 35,923 Forumite

26 August 2011 at 11:33PM

It's in the oxford english dictionary, is that good enough?

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Pedant alert - it's could have, not could of.

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fermi Posts: 40,542 Forumite

27 August 2011 at 8:25AM edited 27 August 2011 at 8:28AM

The 'infraction system' is the name the makers of the software the forum runs on gave to the user warnings system.

If you want to ask why they chose that word, then you should probably ask here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/

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Chinese_Democracy Posts: 13 Forumite

27 August 2011 at 3:26PM

abbyscuito wrote: »

... come up with a better word?

slap on the wrist?

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Old_Wrinkly Posts: 5,182 Forumite

27 August 2011 at 5:18PM

abbyscuito wrote: »

Who uses the word infraction...maybe it's a Scrabble word..it's a terrible no meaning word really...Anybody in MSE care to explain and/or come up with a better word?

From the Latin verb frangere (to break), via its past participle fractus (broken).
Also the source of the word fracture, and the common mathematical word fraction.

An infraction (as generally used in English) means a breaking or breaching of a rule or code of behaviour.
(How it is used by MSE might be a different matter ).

But clearly, there is no good reason why MSE cannot simply say
"We are imposing a posting restriction on you of xx days because (in our view) you broke rule yy paragraph z."
Or just
"We are banning you because we can - it's our site and we can do what we like ."
Personally, I would favour the first alternative ...

Some stuff from Kier Darby here (1st June post) about the Infraction system, but no details of why they called it that. (Possibly they just wanted a single word specifier? I doubt that it seemed an unusual word to the developers. It doesn't to me ...)

Perhaps you could you ask Kier via :
http://twitter.com/#!/KierDarby

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