I totally agree about perma bans, sometimes I do want that some people get punished for toxic behavior, but even with all my anger at that point, I do not want them to be banned forever. There are some reasons for that, one of the main reasons is that faf has got a very low amount of active players. People who are toxic and insulting others are usually people that are addicted pretty much addicted to this game, thus very active in this game. Do not get me wrong, I think that they deserve to be punished, but perma is not the way it should be done. Also, I understand that moderators can not just beware of everything that happens in faf, however I know some examples when a certain player was not banned for the action that others got perma ban for.
For example, @SpikeyNoob remembers a guy with a nickname Honey_Sex, who officially was banned for his "offensive" nickname, but in reality in my opinion that is mostly because of his post on forum, which was also deleted, because the moderators found the post causing conflicts, even though the post was not offensive at all, just people commenting the post where causing conflicts. Why I think that the nickname issue was not the "real" reason for a perma ban? Cause I met so many people with nicknames more offensive than his. One of the biggest examples is Foley, who literally had a nickname with a meaning of "You suck my dick", namely "Usuq_Mydiq" I guess, do not remember. I personally do not find anything insulting when I say "sex", considering that he had a "honey_sex" which was not personal. There is also a person, who literally named themself "dick" (but in russian), and still online.
I also once was talking to the guy who was banned forever in faf, for a smurf account. He was not toxic at all, he shared his story with me. He said that he was not playing home, but in the computer club*. And his friend also did that, and they both got banned from faf for smurfing, cause moderators have thought that it is one person playing from 2 different accounts from 1 PC. He meant that moderators have not even listened to his explanation of that. I mean hardware ID is one of the best ways to find smurfs, but in this particular case 2 ppl were banned just because they do not have own PC. Not fair in my opinion.
Also I want to mention gapforever server, which was also created and consists of people who got perma ban on FAF. Mostly, they have been banned by Rezy, most of them are complaining particularly on one of the admins, who is also sometimes very insulting. The server was created without a hate of faf, it was just created so that people can play their favorite game. I personally have not suffered by non-fair ban in FAF, but some of my friends were, like Dmitry11, for instance once got a ban from Rezy for smurfing, just because the other guy trolled him and made a nickname Dmitry111. So actions and perma bans of moderators (mostly one of them) have caused that 2 more servers were created and one of them is very hateful and wants faf players to suffer a bit.
Generally, I agree that perma bans should exist for cheaters or ppl breaking lobbies, but not for insulting behaviour. There is even a function of muting someone in in-game chat. So I think that would have been way easier to add more functionality to mute toxic players, than implementing a new client because of the revenge of banned player.
*Computer club - a place in post-soviet countries, where u "subletting" a pc in an hourly rate and play video games.