I realize that this is a bit of an odd comparison (and this is gonna seem really offtopic at first, but bear with me), but I see this sort of thing all the time when it comes to communities on LiveJournal-- They do this sort of... Spotlight thing, I guess, advertising different communities. On the one hand for some comm mods, it's awesome for exposure, because then the comms get a lot of new members who are really interested in the topic the community is about (Crafts, politics, art, literature, etc...), but at the same time, other comm mods absolutely despise being spotlighted because it leads to an influx of newbie trolls who don't particularly care for the topic the comm is for, and who choose to post with incredibly offensive or even just totally off-topic things until they're either A) banned, or B) bored and leave.
That could be the case here-- Perhaps FH has been featured somewhere recently and has been getting more attention than it has been in the past, and is attracting newer members because of that. Yes the older members are moving on and newer members are coming in, but it's possible that the ones who don't take it as seriously or who aren't as interested/committed to the game, only checking it out to see what it's like/"for the lulz" (for example, both SA and non-SA folks who go around "raping" people) will have their initial bit of fun, get bored of it, and then move on.
That's what's going to happen with the SA people, and I can guarantee you that's what's going to happen with a lot of the other newbies who had only just found the game and gotten into it-- Especially with the game being completely shut down for the week. They came in, they wreaked their havoc, and they got the game shut down as a result of their shenanigans. They'll get bored, and move on. Even the ones who say "Who cares if I get IP-banned, I'll just switch my IP and make a new account!" get tired of constantly making accounts. Even the folks at SomethingAwful have continuously pointed out how boring the game can be to people who aren't legitimately interested in the feral RP FH is built around. So I'm pretty confident that any trolls who do stir up this kind of trouble never stick around for long.
I mean, yeah, I'm one of the newbies who only found the game within the last week, and I'll most likely be sticking around for when it comes up again, but a lot of the people who have gotten in trouble during all this won't be doing that, especially since both the mods and the more mature users will be cracking down even harder on inappropriate behavior once the game is up and running again-- If someone is cursing up a storm in the chat? Block them or ignore them or whatever, get caps and report it to the mods. Public mating? Same deal: Screencap and report. Mods can't be around all the time to keep an eye on absolutely everything, especially when they're just volunteers who aren't exactly getting paid for the time they put into babysitting the troublemakers. We all have to do our part, too.
The message is getting across now that "If you don't smarten up, nobody will get to play," so I figure we'll see things improving once the servers are online again. We just gotta put a little more work into showing the more immature newbies "Look, this is how things work around here, smarten up or scram."
Hopefully this makes sense. It's 3:30am here and my pain meds are hitting me pretty hard, so I apologize if I'm more incoherent than I seem. I should probably get to sleep soon, actually... xD;;
