How do people get banned?

[Pobre]

All bans are manually made by badbear or do people also get autobanned? if yes, how?

[hilariousandco]

I don't think there's autobans, but they're manually applied by certain mods. Think you can get banned by signing up through tor or proxies as well.

[mitzie]

Bans are applied by globals (and admins), although we (staff) make suggestions

[Cryptopher]

Auto-banning on posts would be extremely harsh, unless there was some kind of anti-spam ban for those who make a series (five-10 posts?) of quick succession (within a couple of seconds of each other) replies.

[BadBear]

Temporary bans can only handed out by theymos or me, others request them as needed in the staff forum. Stefan (justmoon) can but typically doesn't.
Global moderators can ban (permanent), ip-ban, nuke, whitelist.
Local (board specific) mods can nuke, whitelist.

Nuke removes all of a users posts/threads and bans them (spambots).
Whitelist used to allow a newbie to post outside the newbie forum, now it reduces the time restrictions between posts.
If the local mods need someone banned they request it in the staff forum where it's vetted and approved/denied.
There are also patrollers who can moderate all newbies regardless of what board they are posting in.

The autoban thing is misleading. The message you got when banned by a global mod used to include autoban in it, but that was just the name of the tool (and the usergroup), there are no autobans. That message has since been changed.  

[hilariousandco]

What does whitelisting do or is that redundant now since the demise of the newbie jail? Also, who are the patrollers and what do they do other than moderate newbs? I haven't seen any of them, or do they just fall under 'staff'?

[tysat]

What does whitelisting do or is that redundant now since the demise of the newbie jail?

It reduces the wait time between posting, I believe it's cut to 25%.

Also, who are the patrollers and what do they do other than moderate newbs? I haven't seen any of them, or do they just fall under 'staff'?

They do just fall under staff, I'm not sure of the entire list but know that I'm part of that group.

[BadBear]

Added whitelisting info to my post, it reduces the time restrictions between posts, like the 360 seconds for newbies.

And they fall under Staff. Patrollers is mostly made up of existing local mods, like Blitz, tysat, Miningbuddy, etc. Not all, mprep is a patroller with no board.