Hello there, another suggestion coming you're way right now!

I was thinking how great it would be if each user's infraction history would get reset every year. "But we need those to see the bad stuff if they get banned or apply for a staff position" well yes we certainly do but as the staff often say "Old infractions aren't really relevant when applying for a staff position, only more recent ones." and I would imagine the same applies for deciding ban lengths etc.

Imagine a user has been playing since 2009 and has accumulated 10 pages of infraction histories in that time and cannot get a staff position as he is being judged on that so instead someone from 2013 with only 1 or 2 pages gets the position which is hardly fair because naturally a user who has been on the forums longer is bound to have more infractions.

I feel this would be a good addition and extremely easy to implement I would imagine. Thank you for reading.

TL;DR Infractions should be cleared once a year as old infractions are irrelevant and may just result in users getting unfairly judged based on them.

No thanks, your infraction history is also important for determining if you're actually becoming a better user. Also, there is a significant difference between people who have been around for 5 years if one has 10 pages of infractions and one has no infractions at all. As an aside, those people do exist.

Your average person does not have that many infractions. 10 pages of infraction history means that that person has consistently been in violation of the rules, and with 10 pages it is almost impossible for them to not have violated exactly the same rule multiple times. In short, it is almost concrete evidence that if we have an issue with a user, us telling them to fix it won't result in it getting fixed. Most users are actually decent people though, and if we explain what they did wrong and we ask them to not do it again, most of them won't do it again. These people will almost never get more than 2 pages of infractions, no matter how long they stay in the community.

We do check dates on your infractions when you apply for a staff position. If you have 10 pages of infractions, we probably know you by name and reputation already, so we'll know if you've been active. If your most recent infraction is thus still from over a year prior, we will generally assume that you've completely reformed and we have, in fact, given people in this position a chance. Sometimes its even worked out well.

Generally though, if a user has gotten up to the 10 page mark, even if we did delete their infraction history they would just get another few pages the next time they were active. This is a fairly strongly indicated trend we've seen, and it doesn't vary as much as you might think it does.

We do give people with horrible infraction histories second chances. But, as evidenced by their horrible infraction histories, they don't usually use them very well, so why should we purposefully make it harder for us to ensure that they're becoming better users?

So in short, a infraction history is not only to list all their faults but to see if they are improving as a user? Ok got it, thank you for that.