But they did penalize the offender--he is now banned.

The victim did violate the terms of service. She was penalized for that, not for being the victim.

A minor slap on the wrist at best.

Banning someone is pretty much the limit of the authority of FA admins. It's not like they can go out and arrest people.

I know.

the offender only got banned cause there was an uproar about how the admins did nothing.

The offender was not banned yesterday morning

As far as I can see, FA did pretty much what it was able to do. If someone is being harassed or stalked and feels that their safety is being threatened, they should do two things - file a trouble ticket and call the police. They should never under any circumstances respond to the harassment in any other way. That includes warning people. The act of warning people undermines what the police or FA can do. It makes it less clear who is really causing trouble in many situations.

Before things even get bad, there are many ways to prevent stalking and harassment. Using an alias name, blocking problem users, ignoring unwanted comments and shouts, hiding comments, deleting shouts, and not giving out private information, are are good tools to prevent problems in the first place.

Everyone on the net should know that their IP number reveals their likely area, usually to the nearest city. IP numbers are easily visible to anyone who looks, unless someone is connecting through a proxy server. That makes it harder.

If you use a real name, then anyone can simply go to sites like intelus and look up the addresses of everyone with that name in the same area. If you have a common name, they might not be sure which one actually belongs to you. If you ever post your birthdate, phone number, age, etc, then they would know exactly which address belonged to you. Generally any two pieces of real info can be used to find the rest. Worse yet, if a stalker is willing to pay a small fee, often as low as $5, sites like intelus will perform a full background check, revealing a person's criminal record, driving record, list of previous addresses, names of relatives, mortgage details, job titles and pay amount. I ran one on myself and a roommate with his permission once, and it's pretty much a full dump of a person's history and identity, just from having a real name and one other piece random real info.

This means that if a person is concerned about stalkers, or is prone to making enemies or getting into trouble, they should definitely never use their real name on any social sites, and they should not be posting their birthdate or any photos of their face. Google, Yahoo and Flickr are getting very good at face recognition and an unlabeled photo can often still be identified accurately to an individual name.

The internet has risks, and there are stalkers. FA can't do much about it, besides banning people when they are actually sure that it is happening. Not making enemies in the first place tends to prevent 90 percent of stalking and harassment problems. Taking the proper steps when it happens, tends to take care of nearly all of the rest. There are always exceptions though. There are actually a few sick people out there who will stalk, even when the victim has done everything perfectly right and by the book. Those are the ones that tend to require police action.