First, people keep mentioning that the game is old to stress the fact that the people that are still around (and they're bound to shrink) hang around only because they enjoy the game play and community so much, not because of graphics, cool effects, new status etc. The number one enemy of game play enjoyment is cheating. The number one enemy of community survival is abuse of the rules it was found on. You can say UTA has many rules, but really only one rule makes the whole thing work, and that is the mutual consent of fair play.
Second, I don't see how cheating on public is fine, but on a match is serious. Are you saying you don't give a shit for the people that are playing public against the botter, so as long as he doesn't cheat against you it's fine. Goes to show the typical society today "Hey, as long as I am not affected, it's all good." Also, that is clearly an open invitation to test cheats against our protection system on public servers. I have already heard/seen evidence of people trying to do exactly that…
Third, any system with a gradually increasing ban is useless. The people that cheat deliberately are obviously looking for short term satisfaction of "omg I owned you", hence there is no reason why they would care for a temp ban. They can go on cheating in other games (it's quite common that they try cheating in most games, since it's a character trait usually), and just come back when ban is over. Someone that really cares for the game, and understands he did a really bad mistake, will really do everything he can to get people to forgive him, which can easily be handled with an appeal after a certain time period (something like eligible for parole in prison).
Fourth, admins, consider that every time you show leniency against a cheater, you are really pissing off all the people that voted for perm ban, and definitely risk losing some of them, while everyone else that voted differently would not be really affected if you were strict (unless they were planning to try cheating themselves, in which case, good riddance). Yes, not everyone will leave right away, but speaking for myself at least, I take one step away from this game and community every time I hear another loser is part of it and abusing it. I simply count on the people I know I can trust to have my fun.
Lastly, at this point of time, when the internet is full of teenagers striving to control their hormones, it is quite a rare event to find a place you can have a fair, clean game to take a break off normal things. There used to be a public ut server that got so strict at some point, a simple racist remark or flame would ban you from it. Sure, there was a big bunch of teenagers crying around about how strict it was, but I could count on always hoping there and playing without worrying about taking shit from anyone, just pure game fun and fun conversations. The easier the access to a free resource, the stricter the control over its use must be, otherwise its demise is guaranteed. (at least in this time…)
You don't have any friends who are you kidding? 
