Approximately 5 months ago, 4 users (Fabrigonation, KMPK99, sagemodewade, and UsefulSam28) were indefinitely banned for abusing an exploit in the NetworkManager plugin to ban innocent players. The provided evidence clearly showed that the punishments were logged under their names, and there was no reason to assume that this information could be forged. Some changes were made to fix the exploit, and they seemed to have worked since there were no further issues.
However, 2 days ago, the exact same exploit was used to kick and ban multiple players, this time under the name of admin riawo. Unlike last time, several other admins were engaged and verified that it was unlikely that riawo actually performed the actions. A player that had just joined then came forward and claimed that they used an exploit to achieve this.
This of course caused suspicion, and after some investigation, the worst-case scenario turned out to be true: There was a serious issue in NetworkManager that gave a very high level of access, enough to give out arbitrary punishments while impersonating any player. Updates on the exploit itself will be posted at https://forum.totalfreedom.me/d/3698.
With that in mind, the only reasonable thing to do is to nullify the indefinite bans of all 4 users above. That means that for future issues, the players should be treated as if these indefinite bans never existed, not as if they were banned and unbanned.
Of course, that doesn't take away from the fact that 4 users were unfairly banned for almost half a year. On top of that, they received comments that they were simply lying about the situation. Although I didn't personally add these bans and didn't even consider the possibility of such an exploit, I am ultimately responsible. Therefore, on behalf of everyone that meant well but was misled by the situation: I am sorry.