Try reading the ban list, It tells you when and why they where banned.
Well being banned on toribash isn't really the most significant, hard to accomplish thing.
It would probably take a few hours to get back to bans that were given in 2011.
Alan was phished and people used his account to delete and merge a ton of threads. I think it's still locked down to prevent abuse, at that time Alan wasn't very active so maybe he just said "don't bother unbanning it"
Well being banned on toribash isn't really the most significant, hard to accomplish thing.
It would probably take a few hours to get back to bans that were given in 2011.