It's not permanent in the sense that we remove the penalty when we see that the user has shifted their behavior. That could be either because someone emails us or because we (randomly) take a look at the situation and change things.
I know that's problematic because it depends on us seeing things and manually doing them. I'd love to automate it—not just because it would be fairer but because it would be less work for us! But I don't know how to write code to do that.