EntropyTFAs a start can we stop just combing through logs looking for infractions? I can't think of a circumstance where a ban should come from anything but a report.
These bans do come from reports. The MAL player ban came from a report. In my 5 seasons working at RGL, I've seen a single staff member (not even a 6s admin) comb through logs, and they were removed from the organization over a year ago for that and similar problems. We've even warned league players for combing specific players' and teams' logs for infractions, which is a form of witch-hunting and prohibited. If you actually read any of RGL's articles, you'd see that in almost every single article related to bans, we put in brightly colored text that we only ban off reports. The most recent article, which you should go read because clearly you haven't, mentions it. If a player is banned, it is because they were reported.
EntropyTFIf the admins can't even tell a map review from a scrim they're clearly going to be missing context on everything else as well.
In many hundreds of reports we've handled with logs, this is the first time anything like this has occurred. Logs.tf does not display timestamps, and we have no good reason to assume chat messages in the log did not happen during pregame or the scrim, as you can see in the log here. When the rare odd edge cases like this happen, we have an appeals process to handle it, which worked as it should and the players were unbanned (due to the high-profile nature of the MAL case, we took a bit more time to figure out our response internally before rolling back the bans).