noname2200 said:
Three things. First, on this site a "perma" ban only lasts two years; if the person still cares about/remembers their account after those two years, they can log back in afterwards. Second, you're always free to appeal your ban, "perma" or otherwise, with the mods, who have the discretion to repeal it. I'm guessing appealing a perma-ban almost never succeeds, unless there's been a serious misunderstanding or some such, but it is theoretically possible. The third way, and the one that's affected the most users, is for their to be an "amnesty," in which all banned users are allowed to return. This happened over the summer, when ioi lifted all bans on all people for reasons known only to himself. It's unclear whether and when this will happen again, though, so don't count on this method.
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Method 1. It probably lasts forever, but the way they are displaying the ban date is to use the last date currently stored in the system. The same thing happens when I set release dates to TBD or Cancelled. I'm sure that date will adventually change to a later date.
Method 2. This is a legitimate method, and has worked once to my knowledge
Method 3. It really isn't unknown why everyone got unbanned. There was a bug in the system that caused ioi to unban half the users. When they fixed the banning system they decided just to unban the rest of the users. I doubt this will ever happen again
Method 4. I'm fairly sure someone has done this, but I have no proof. There must be some way of tricking the server into unbanning a user. So far i know of 2 accounts (and I'm fairly sure they are the same person) who have successfully gotten unbanned from a perma ban and I'm fairly sure no mods did it. Again, I have no proof, only that they are unbanned and I don't believe a mod did it.
