User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-1724320-20110927181030/@comment-1922674-20110927211950

Randomtime: In most cases, warning a user is not feeding the trolls. It is clearly obvious when a vandal takes warning messages as encouragement, but this is really just a small percentage of vandals. At least, this is how it is on the RuneScape wiki. I can't exactly vouch for other wikis which I do not edit.

Most of the vandals that I have dealt with submit their edits under the impression that the edits will go unnoticed; they do so in order to prove a point. They merely want to show that wikis are sometimes unreliable sources of information due to the ease in which users may modify/remove content. However, when this user gets a message a mere 20 seconds after their first act of vandalism, they usually realize that the wiki is better moderated than they had previously imagined. Over half of the users that I warn do not end up being blocked for any period of time, and it can clearly be seen as a consequence of warning the user. Sometimes, the notifications bubble is buggy, and the user does not see the messages posted on his/her talk page until after they are blocked. In fact, when this happens, the user often does not realize that they have ALREADY been blocked. In other words, there is a clear correlation between warning a user after reverting vandalism and vandalism from the user in question stopping.

Basically, reverting vandalism and then blocking without warning a user is definitely NOT the way to go. Warning the user gets the message across that vandalism is not tolerated and is swiftly dealt with, and users who vandalize repeatedly in order to grab attention can easily just be blocked. It's just a much better system this way.