I hold the firm belief that permanent bans should only be handed out in the most extreme of circumstances. Everybody has 'off' days. Sometimes people endure months of the same poster carefully skirting the established rules to cause trouble, often following them across different threads in an attempt to rile them up. All it takes is for the target to snap and call their stalker an idiot and they risk a ban. I know a lot of people who do not post on this forum due to being banned and more often than not the things they have said are hardly worthy of stifling them permanently.