Purgatory?
Hi All,
Kill/score files would be nice. But as a stop-gap, could a simple trust/privilege mechanism be built into the software? That is, if a post was off-topic or somehow violated the Guidelines, could it be given a negative privilege score and automatically moved into a new Purgatory forum and locked there? The benefit would be that the poster would still have posting privileges (so no banning would be imposed), but it would be clear that the post was inappropriate and it wouldn't be possible to extend the thread. And having the software work on the post level would catch instances when a generally trusted poster goes off the deep end temporarily. New users would initially be trusted to post appropriately.
A committee of some number of regulars could serve to evaluate whether a particular post merited being put in Purgatory, taking much of the load off admin. There shouldn't be much of a load on them, and Purgatory shouldn't be needed very often.
In particularly egregious cases, the poster could have their posts directed to Purgatory automatically until they shape-up (i.e. a negative score to the poster).
I can see lots of complications (e.g. what if people follow-up before the post is moved?), so it's not an ideal solution, but it would be a way around the banning concern without the complication of a full client-side kill/score filing system.
I agree that the best solution is to not reply to off-topic posts.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
