I'd like to suggest a list containing violations and what kind of penalty can a player receive for them.
Example:
Insulting a player who doesn't break rules - 24h mute
Insulting a player who does break a rule - 1h mute
Killing friendly buildings/units on purpose - 1 month lobby ban
Abusing autohost commands, spamming - 24h
And so on. Doing a violation twice would end up in a double the penalty received last time.
And why? This would be like a strict criteria on which penalties are issued, and every player would have to agree to it, so
if someone gets punished and makes a topic on forum (not talking about
Tweeki !) starting to argue with admins and saying that they are abusing their rights et cetera, an admin would be able to post a link to the list and close the case.
Of course it would also make punishments more equal and easier to understand.
It's natural that an admin might have a bad day and his actions may be more punishing. We are all humans and it's understandable, but it also creates unnecessary and pointless conflicts, and the time and energy spent on them is... wasted.
Take this thread as an example - instead of few walls of text, one admin would respond "We understand your frustration, but for insulting a Player which does Z and Y you receive Xh mute. We will look up Player's case and bring proper punishment" -thread closed-
Imo, there must be a strict equality in punishments, or people will continue on arguing and calling admins badmins.