Since banning ended up being a big part of their revenue model, I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account. That would have avoided the chaos of losing users that had reputation while still kind of working for their odd moderation and revenue system. They could have also, of course, just made the $10 an annual thing and solved it that way too, but that just seems clinical to the madness that made the forum entertaining, and the banning kind of played into the humor.

I'll out here that my work is very strongly influenced by Something Awful and I had an account there a very long time ago. I was banned by Zack Parsons for I don't even remember what post (nothing any reasonable person would think deserved a ban), and that was the end of my participation in the SA forums, I didn't want to have to re-build an identity from scratch there and I decided to move on, for better or worse.