A lot of things that get you banned now wouldn't have even warranted a warning in the early days. The Coli was almost self moderating, particularly JBO, and it was up to the posters to report anything deemed too troublesome. At that time almost nothing was off limits.
However, much like Twitter, what was accepted on the platform changed over time. So while the posters may have cleaned up their act, their old posts were still there to be dug up for scrutiny.
Some of the posters being banned were banned because of posts dating back years. A lot of this was new to the moderating staff but the climate had changed and now there was a demand for action, no matter how old the post was.
And the userbase will say, "How did you all let that slide for so long?" My response is that the userbase let it slide. You look at some of these posts and they come from major threads and no one reported them, usually just arguing back and forth with the poster or not even acknowledging them. So SOME of these things were tolerated by the userbase.
We still let a lot slide honestly compared to other forums but a lot of chickens have been coming home to roost.
As for
@Cobratron, he may have been a victim of a running gag of his own creation. The jury is still out on that one.