Malinko was just trying to make it look like UN had a lot of players on it so they would log onto UN instead of one of the other servers. Then we started getting complaints about people having false online time because of it so I made him put the disconnecting back on.
It also made it more difficult for the GP's to spot people using mining bots since 80% of the server was idling anyway. At one point it was changed so that rc's didn't disconnect for idling because of the whole development issue but somewhere along the line that seems to have changed.