I have to say 17 is more like the number I would have expected but there are three banned members asking for a reprieve in the thread. I wonder why the applicants decided to make contact with admin asking for a second chance via email. Could it be because they did not want their current accounts to be associated with the banned account or is there something else behind it?
There is no end period set as of yet.
So far we've received ~17 requests by email. I've been waiting a bit to get a baseline - to avoid the risk of being too strict/lenient. Whatever the case may be, it's almost impossible to please everyone at the same time and would like to remind everyone that it's easier to ban than to unban.
Here are the unbanned users as of yet: