A stipulation of a if someone tells you they find it offensive might be valid, but its hardly fair to say people can't say offensive things, have no idea that what they said was offensive, then get punished for being offensive. If someone said I am offended by what you said and he kept using it, sure its fair to punish him because thats not playing with friends but do you get pissed at friends because they said something offensive out of ignorance? That doesn't seem like you are playing with friends when acting like that either.
I agree with you, which is why I have said, over and over again, that as the offended party your first course of action should always be to take it up directly with the person who offended you and make an attempt to work it out. I suppose that won't stop people from coming here first anyway on occasion, but unless the offense is fairly spectacular I expect our reaction will generally be to do nothing more than issue a warning, if in fact we do anything at all. If such occurrences became commonplace, I would probably advocate putting in place a policy of simply rejecting any case where no effort had been made to discuss the matter with the offender.
