Anoek’s 2014 post seems to address a problem in a very specific portion of the population, where there was little reason to suspect any cheating or habitual rude behavior (such as timing out of correspondence games).
Perhaps circumstances subsequently changed and a wider variety of players were triggering the rule, leading to a need to tighten the range of acceptable excuses. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I became a mod, the rule was explained, discussed, and acted upon in terms of rare events.
@jlt’s list of causes fails to mention cases of what I call unconscious abuse of the rule, whereby players routinely timeout the games they are losing. Ironically, I think this is by far the most common cause of serial timeouts. Timing out is now a widespread phenomenon in the correspondence culture. It is accepted because it is no longer a reportable violation. No, I cannot prove this statistically; indeed, it is probably impossible to prove due to a lack of easily accessible information, or, if the information does exist, it would require know-how and a wildly obsessive personality to get at it.
However, as I already noted, I have taken a tour of correspondence games and random players, which convinced me that routine timeouts are incredibly common. If one times out most lost games, it will create some serial timeouts as a matter of course. Most such timeout strings will be short.
This is why I asked “how would you know?” Timeout reports were the main source of leads that would bring about discovery of potential abuse of the rule. Has anyone, other than me, reported abuse of the rule in the last several years? Has anyone (not asking for names, you understand) even been warned for abusing the rule? Back in the day @Eugene and I handled most, if not all, of the reports. Has any current mod, aside from Eugene, ever handled a single report of abuse of the rule?
Yes, the flag was abolished because it was buggy—the automated removal process for the flag wasn’t working right. Restoration of an unbuggy flag would be one of the best things that could be done to ameliorate abuse of the rule.