Then come some restrictions to the trolls: If their troll-score gets too high they are restricted from creating new threads. Higher still, and a possible temp-ban is in order. What do you guys think?
Merit-to-post ratio could work for this purpose and it would cover more garbage-producing behaviors than just trolling.
Could be useful, but at the same time could become authoritarian real soon, especially in political boards i could see this being misused fairly quickly. eg To silence people which are unliked.
I don't think that temporarily preventing someone from creating new threads, or perhaps throttling to X posts per day, or some other limitation of
excessive disruptive posting really prevents them from exercising their free speech. It would be merely a cool down period.
Tempbans should be issued only by moderators, although a "troll score" could serve as a helpful metric if the person also gets a bunch of mod reports.
All this would never get implemented though, unless theymos sells the forum to CSW and retires to his private island.
It's a tempting idea, but there are so many reasons why it wouldn't work--and it's not really necessary anyway.
Yeah, this wouldn't be needed if only we could figure out how to use the "Ignore" feature...