Change of thread title
So, how would you give an instruction then? If you had wanted to instruct us to delete or ban you if A then how would you give that instruction other than to say: If A, delete me or ban me?
I mean I accept Americans might say, "If he doesn't fall flat on his face, he scores", which is effectively a grammatical simplification and easy to understand, but that's a completely different construction to the one you used because the second clause of the conditional is in a different grammatical
mood not just tense, i.e. indicative vs. imperative. Maybe the colloquialism has to do with the part of America you're from because in standard American English the imperative mood is used to give instructions and orders and the indicative mood is used for questions and statements just as it is in standard British English. That should be the case regardless of whether the conditional construction is used. The differences in standard British and American English in terms of grammar are fairly tiny compared to those in dialects of some other languages. Anyway, I'm mostly curious because I teach English and I haven't come across this before and it leaves me wondering as I mentioned above how you would express an instruction if not with an imperative.
(Of course, effectively your particular instruction was a request but leaving that aspect aside, it's the grammar I'm mostly curious about).