To build upon, as well as one-up ghax’s description

The primary purpose of community bans is to keep the people who are doing things that are *ahem* frowned upon by the community overlords, and are put in place to keep them from doing said things. If they talk via a proxy account/friend (bumuming its a legal one of course) that’s all well and good unless its involves posting more stupid. (yes, I use stupid as a noun, deal with it)

These were put in place in opposition to regular bans, as a fair amount of people (nerd o powa, DerKaiserReich, and all the dum-dums who post goatse for free BP, to name a few examples) weren’t doing anything harmful enough to give a full fledged exile. Regular bans are handed out to people who break the sites core rules, ones that don’t pertain solely to Flamebate (toxx, deliberate haxxing, klan voting in buildrs)

Permabans are pretty self-explanatory. They are MOSTLY handed out to people who one of the mods have had enough of them and want them gone, tbh. Those cases usually aren’t as perma as they come off, and if the mod is in a particularly nice mood, then unbans will be randomly handed out to the ones we miss the zany antics of the most.