Since sometime in March (or thereabouts), we added the following to the signup page:

If you have deactivated your account, you are NOT allowed to create another account, as explained on the page where you deactivated your account. You may petition to have your account reinstated. Such petitions will be voted on by the moderators, and after the voting is complete, you will be informed of the decision.

You may not petition the mods for reinstatement until one year has passed from your account deactivation. Each duplicate account you create will add one year to the waiting period, and reset the beginning of that waiting period to when the last duplicate account was penalized.

Many have suggested that this was done at the request of byujacob, which is untrue. I think he must have just noticed it. It was actually requested by Gerald-DeGroot, who has yet to make use of the new policy. I told him over a year ago that we would create a policy "soon", but it took me a lot longer than I expected to come up with a policy that we deemed fair. Others have taken advantage of the new policy before byujacob did, they just weren't noticed.

Yes, the deactivation text still says it's permanent. It creates more work for us, so I'd rather people didn't deactivate in the first place. I'll probably change the text sometime, though, to reflect the current policy.