Net terminology just changed over time.

It used to be, both in games and on forums, that a ‘ban’ typically implied that it was permanent, or for a considerable amount of time, like multiple weeks or a month or more, or until removed from a banlist.

If a ban was temporary, it would be qualified by clarifying that it was a temporary ban.

Otherwise, just using ‘ban’ almost always meant a permanent ban.

A ‘kick’, on the other hand, usually meant direct ejection from a game in the moment, and maybe 15 or 30 minutes of inability to rejoin, or an inability to rejoin that temporary session… though the terminology varied more from forum to forum.

This was just the common lingo used by many earlier games and forums in their own code, in their own technical documentation for server administration.

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Likewise, ‘pm’ (private message) became ‘dm’ (direct message).

I’m pretty sure Discord is entirely responsible for that.

They started calling private chats ‘direct messages’ even though basically every forum or what have you up till Discord called them ‘private chats’ or ‘private messages’.

EDIT: Evidently Twitter actually started this trend 2 years before Discord, I did not know this as I have hated the concept of Twitter since its inception and never used it =P

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‘Mods’ / ‘Modding’ / ‘Modder’, as in game mods, used to exclusively mean that you (and others, in a multiplayer game) were using or creating additional community content that altered game mechanics, almost always in a constructive way that added to the game experience for everyone.

‘Warez’ / ‘Cheats’ / ‘Hacks’ used to specifically refer to … things that are arguably, technically ‘Mods’, but manipulate your experience of the game to give you a (theoretically) covert series of advantages over the game such that competiton is now blatantly unfair.

Those terms are still used to mean that… but, as less and less games support modding, and more and more switched away from having server browsers to just having a ‘find match’ button… with a whole lot of those kinds of games, ‘Modding’ now just means cheating or hacking.

If you got to a GTA V game or community and say ‘I’m a modder’ they will interperet that as ‘I am a cheater’, not ‘I make and have made mods for one or many PC games.’

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All of these newer uses of the terms are still ‘correct’ in the sense that you can justify the meanings of the newer terms, its not like they’re misnomers…

… but a lot of zoomers / casuals have little to no understanding of how the terminology changes are confusing to an older gamer who finds themselves in a community of younger folks.