I support your suggestion, because troll is not allowed, but I still see some users continously troll over years, and it seems they have not yet get any kind of bans (as I know). Not sure what happened more than 2 years ago with trollers, but last 2 years, I have not seen trollers got ban (by their trolling, not from plagiarism or spam, eg.)
It happens, but it's rare, only the most disruptive of trolls end up with permabans, even temp bans aren't very common.
Yeah, I really wasn't a fan of this, though it was at least some barometer for trolls, but it was also abused or could give the wrong impression. Back in the day people used to use the ignore button if they didn't like what you were saying or just because you were on a signature campaign and they'd be open about telling you that. People shouldn't be lit up like trolls just because someone doesn't like what you're saying. How many of us would be marked as trolls just because there's certain people who don't like you or have a few alts they can do the same on just to try impact you negatively. By all means, use the ignore button if you don't want to see what certain people are saying but that shouldn't effect how others perceive you.
A very tiny percentage of all users were marked as trolls, because the highlight appeared only if enough of "very-established users" ignored them, how many people back then had alts active enough to have their ignores count?
You're very established if:
- You have 100+ hours of online time
- You have 100+ posts
- You registered 30+ days ago
There are ~1414 very-established users right now.
The change only shows up in the default theme.
As the number of users, and by extension the number of very-established users grew, the only way for trolls to keep being marked was to keep engaging in trollish behaviours. Every 500 posts someone made would also decrease his ignore count by 1.
Theymos also said he'd ban anyone trying to farm accounts for the purpose of ignoring someone they didn't like with more very-established accounts.