I can’t seem to find a definition for different kinds of icons Sync uses for special users, e.g. I know how OP and my account are denoted, I have seen bot accounts marked, also I guess that I have seen a mark where a user blocked me.
Is there a place where I can check what each pictogram means and what are the possible ones?
Wow, it’s that.
Makes me wonder what did the one I saw that on to earn a ban. Does that mean banned on an instance or something other than that?
You can get banned at the instance level or at the community level.
If you get banned from your home instance (where you made your account, in your case programming.dev) then you can’t login anymore and you’re effectively 100% banned.
If you get banned from a remote instance, you can still login, but can’t interact with communities or users from the instance who banned you.
If you get banned at the community level, you can no longer interact with that community.
You can check the modlog on the web, search for that username and see what happened.
You were right, they are banned on home instance for a week for trolling. It didn’t occur to me that a ban may be temporary
Not sure about that part, but my guess is that its banned from its home instance, so the account basically cannot participate anywhere.
Bans apply on an instance or banned in the specific community.
If you’re interested in why, check out the modlog. It’s probably slow as hell, but with some patience you should be able to filter on that particular user and see why the user ended up getting a ban (if one was provided by the user who executed the ban).
Also, not all bans are permanent. Mods and admins can automatically unban someone after a certain amount of days. I’ve seen various 14 day bans being applied on different servers.