[RussEfarmer]

Hello,

I'd like to once again fight against the use of permanent banning as a commonplace punishment in favor of long term temporary bans for the reasons stated in this thread.

Player bans in general are used to keep a player that has continually broken the rules off of the server for a period of time. Permanent bans obviously do this job well, but I believe it is an extremely overkill solution that can be replaced with long temp temporary bans ranging from 6 months to one year. Many communities have grown numb to what a permanent ban is: when you ban that player, that player can NEVER play here again without going through the appeal process. This server could still be running when I turn 80 years old, and that person will STILL not be able to play here. There isn't a good reason to have bans last that long for most offenses.

Meanwhile, with long temporary bans, you can have someone join and say the N word and be stupid or whatever. The guy gets banned for a year for being racist, which is pretty fair. People aren't usually hopping from server to server saying the N word for an entire year, so 2 years in the future when that person is browsing for TTT servers to join, he can join back and just play as a regular player with absolutely no remembrance of what happened before.

Seriously, do people really think that some random guy who turns on hacks or something in a 20 year old video game and gets banned is going to remember what happened 5 years in the future? Why do we continue to keep people banned in time frames where that person couldn't feasibly remember what they even did to get banned, especially for dumb offenses like hacking and mass RDM? When I appealed my full on community ban over a year ago, I was banned three years before making that appeal. Did I remember the general idea of why I was banned? Yes obviously, it was very bad. Did I feel bad about doing what I remember? Yes. Do I remember the details? No! I was apparently banned from the Discord since 2017. I don't even remember having Discord in 2017. Now imagine what someone who hops on TTT and throws an incend remembers two years later.

People who are banned long enough forget what they did to get banned in the first place. During this time, they also usually grow and mature. If we find evidence that someone three years ago spammed the n word in chat and banned them right now, we've basically banned a completely different person. That same concept applies to overly long bans, at a certain point it stops being a punishment for a rule breaker or a precaution against someone wanting to harm the server; it just becomes something blocking a potentially good player from joining.

I'll end with saying that permanent banning in appropriate situations is very justified, such as cases of player harassment or an attempt to damage the physical server itself. But in a lot of cases, it's just not necessary. TTT currently has over 12,000 players banned that can never, ever join back again for some reason or another. How many of them did we ban forever just because we were annoyed that they found it funny to mow down a crowd of 9 people? How many of them did we ban for saying the n word once 6 years ago? Now, how many of them do we actually want gone for good, like the people that harass women in private, or the people that have stayed in the community for 6 months for the sole purpose of being a nuisance?

(sorry if this post is structured a little weird, it's late.. read my old one if you want something a bit less crappy)