Um, no, not really. An account that gets put in retirement still has read-only access to all public sections of the forum. A ban on the other hand denies all access to the forum — or at least, so long as they haven't cleared out their cookies. And if we really want to prevent someone from accessing the forum altogether in any possible way, then we can also add the IP address to the firewall. We've already had to do this for security reasons, but this was still before my time, and currently, the only IP addresses I ban by way of the firewall all belong to data mining bots, spam bots and other confirmed spammers who repeatedly try registering an account here.
On account of the retirement of someone's account, we have already retired the accounts of people before without that they requested it, when we felt that banning them would have been needlessly cruel. But usually their behavior was then right on the cusp between warranting retirement and warranting a ban. And in this case, I could indeed have banned Jakob, but, again, I didn't wish to be cruel.
There are members who've been retired, but who will
never be welcomed back even if they were to request it. In fact, we've already refused a couple such requests. And at the same time, there are also members who were banned in the past, but who
would be welcomed back if they were to ask for a second chance. It all depends on the person, really.