It has been over a week since I got the Chat behavior and guidelines to a point where I feel it addresses all of the concerns that have been brought up about our Chat.
Since we didn't have anything like this in place when most of the kickbans were set, I am considering going through all accounts currently kickbanned from Chat and removing the kickban. This will give everyone a chance to start over from a point where they know what behavior is allowed.
I realize that there were some people who were kickbanned for items listed in our block policy, so I will try to talk with the chatmods about why each person was kickbanned to determine if/when they should be unblocked.
In the future, we probably should go through the kickban list once or twice a month and remove them. This implies that the person didn't commit any of the more serious infractions covered by our block policy. In general, anything that would have resulted in a block of less than a month should be considered as expired when the admin removes the kickban. (Notify an admin if they're being kicked out for any infractions that warrant a block of one month or longer.) The User Rights Log shows the kickban activity, so if we start seeing several instances of kick/unkick for a person in the log, then we'll start taking a look at whether they're deliberately causing problems, as stated in the "Appealing a kickban" section of the guidelines.