I saw this, and I can explain it.

In plain language, the community failure clause is basically saying, "Our rules can't account for everything. If you find some other way to hurt the community often enough or long enough, we can still deal with it."

It was put in place precisely because some people are really good at following most of the rules but still being difficult to deal with. Moonwalker/Death Star is a classic example. She was constantly attacking people, making insinuations and basically stirring up trouble. While she only broke rules occasionally, it was very clear that a lot of people weren't happy with what she was doing, and frankly, neither were we. Eventually, the community failure clause could be invoked to punish her in a way that was different from the typical way of doing things.

A lot of sites and communities have clauses like this. Basically, if you're not being a jerk over and over again, you have no reason to worry about getting into trouble. one mistake, or one misunderstood action, won't get you punished with the community failure clause. It's for people who have knowingly danced around rules, or whose behaviour has been going on long enough and often enough that standard rules and consequences don't really work anymore. Rather than write rules with half a dozen clauses each, and rather than have an overly elaborate punishment system, we just stuck in a community failure clause. We don't like invoking it unless we have to, and it can only be invoked by multiple staff members, so it's extremely difficult to use it to unfairly target someone.

Does that explain things? Do you have any further questions?