User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Updates to Wikia Chat/@comment-5108008-20120508045038/@comment-4053809-20120508153545

Welome00 - The six month expiration on the old "bannedfromchat" is arbitrary. In the old system, all chat bans were permanent (admins and chat mods had to go back in and update or remove the ban manually). As we move away from "bannedfromchat" we needed to find a length of time to automatically expire the old status. Chat mods and admins can go in at any time and manually remove those old bans.