This rule dates back to the year 2015, when there were disagreements about the blocking policy on the already declining Tenkai Knights Wiki. There were problems with an user, who sometimes wrote questionable posts, who were conceived as trolling. One party, led by a bureaucrat unconnected to MoviezWorldwide, called for an infinite block, even without a previous rule violation, something which is now deemed illegal on Fandom, as blocks should always be based on rule violations according to their new policy. MoviezWorldwide's staff, however, already not accepting of power abuse at that time, predating Fandom's aforementioned new policy by several years, wanted that everything should be fair and square and that nobody gets banned without having violated the rules and in particular not for infinite too soon. And so the disagreements soon turned into personal attacks, the followers of the bureaucrat unrelated to MoviezWorldwide, accusing us of being incompetent and even waging a crusade to try to get us demoted on all wikis. My deceased colleague, who managed the English wikis at that time, while I managed the German ones, was extremely overwhelmed by this horrific situation, as he already was weakened by severe depression. So I was asked to give my two cents to help to calm down the situation, along with my other deceased colleague. We agreed upon introducing a rule, which made it possible that infinite blocks could be better enforced, but also showed regard to users who could redeem themselves. Our experience showed that permanent blocks without any foreseeable chance to get unblocked encouraged the permanently blocked users to create tons of sockpuppet accounts. So we set the time after which a parole vote should take place to one year and also stated that if a permanently blocked user is caught sockpuppeting the year before the next parole vote would reset. This rule definitely calmed the situation down at that time, as users from both parties were accepting of it. The conflicts mostly got resolved and we could leave the dying Tenkai Knights Wiki behind to expand to further communities to which we brought many features originally developed for Tenkai Knights Wiki, which unfortunately was doomed as there was no second season, even though it was once announced. My deceased colleague would succumb to his depression more and more, which would ultimately make me taking his position as manager of the English communities and thus uniting all communities of MoviezWorldwide. Upon becoming community manager I made sure that our blocking policy would be introduced to other of our wikis, as I always was in favour of centralizing our communities even more than my predecessor did. Over the following years the concensus among the fans and staff members of MoviezWorldwide always was in favour of our blocking policy, which was praised to be very progressive, user-friendly and transparent. So, in short there are good reasons for this blocking policy. It keeps the community informed of who caused severe problems over time. As well, there can be users, who want to give the permanently blocked user a new chance, even though he hasn't been active on any community for a longer time. Some users could say something like: "It's been ten years since he was blocked, perhaps he has forgot about the wiki over time and definitely changed his ways throughout all those years, probably because he became an adult, or even redeemed himself later in life, or even died." It of course depends on the opinions of the users of the community, some users are more willing to give further chances, while others are not. You could also judge such cases similar to the usage of the old Latin phrase "in dubio pro reo" (if there are doubts, whether the blocked user could still cause problems, he should get paroled as well even if it's just a "second class"-parole) It's still best to give users the opportunity to regularly judge such situations, as there are also cases of users who edit on other wikis even years or decades after getting blocked on one wiki. So in these cases you can see much better whether they have changed or not. If they showed problematic behaviour on one wiki, users on the wiki where he is permanently blocked can assume, that he would also cause problems on this wiki and vote against his unblocking. So yes, such parole votes are still necessary, as MoviezWorldwide always wanted that everything goes fair and square on our multitude of communities.