The second chance is only for individuals who were banned for plagiarism and not for ban evasion cheaters, and anyone who plagiarised again would be banned again. This is simple.
I hope you are correct; that's the way it sounded in the OP but was a bit hard to tell for sure. Because once an account is un-banned for ban evasion, what's to stop them from getting re-banned in the future when another connection is made to their old (still banned) account?
Case in point:
This user case is complicated!
The best bet is to get the old account unbanned. But the annesty is only for plagiarism cases not ban evaders.
If they didn't care enough (or didn't know how) to file an appeal, how would this thread help? Are the admins going to e-mail every banned user? Or is this targeted only towards ban-evading users who are assumed to be following meta dramas closely enough to notice this thread?
Whatever the idea behind this thread is, I don't get why that effort shouldn't be applied to handling the actual ban appeals the way these appeals were intended to work.
1. Why should they appeal for something they knew they were guilty of? The majority of the ban appeal threads were created by liars who claimed they had no idea why they were banned despite clear evidence against them.
2. The majority of ban appeal threads were hijacked by the community and turned into a spam zone - until the admin creates a separate board for ban appeals where only the victims could post and wait for a decision nothing will change.
Most of the new forums I've seen have a separate board for offenders/appeals and selected members/mods who investigate such matters.
Side note: only 1-2% of banned users truly left the forum, the rest % are still here on the forum with different identity.