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After losing UndeddJester for a second time, and being reminded of how many great community members we've lost over the years, thanks to people constantly digging up necro-threads. It's made me think about the ban escalation system.

The four strike rule is nice and simple, but it lacks nuance. Being able to skips steps is fine, as some things warrant an immediate ban. Forum users who visit at the weekends will understand this pretty well. But considering how easy it is to get a warning, let's be real, you don't have to be that rude to get a strike, the system doesn't work well when people have been here for years.

Everyone will have less than perfect responses sometimes when encountering the huge amount of aggressive, disrespectful posts that people often write. Should you get baited? No. But someone who greatly contributes to the community should not be thrown away over a trivial social faux pas. I don't know what Undedd was banned for, but I don't believe for a moment it was for saying anything truly awful. It would be completely out of character for them to do so. So I feel safe assuming it was just some minor infraction. Or nothing at all. Mods do sometimes make mistakes when observing conversations.

So what I propose is a system where infractions that are not worthy of an immediate ban, decay over time. Similar to how DC penalties work in game. This seems like a more nuanced, and human way of handling the community. The worst offenders will still get banned, and we won't lose any more long standing community members, because they responded slightly poorly a total of four times over ten years.

UndeddJester was quite frankly the best our community had to offer. Their contributions will be sorely missed.