⭐ Merited by PowerGlove (4)
~ I think the best compromise is to just let them keep pursuing their own ideology and keep trying (with far too much zeal, IMO) to tag and flag undesirables, but only amongst themselves (as in, with other users that share their ideology).
How fun would it be to have multiple definitions of "DefaultTrust": one the way it is, but also "DefaultTrustNoPolice" which excludes the "policing" accounts. It's going to be one happy positive feedback fest in that one and only the worst scammers will show red. The problem of course will be who decides who gets into which category, without centralized decision making.The people (like me) that would point-in-time disappear from view from the perspective of the pro-police side, would then be free to do anything permitted by the forum's rules, without ever having to worry about user-to-user power dynamics of any kind (on the no-police side of the forum, there'd be no trust system at all, and therefore no rule-following path that could possibly lead to account ruination; you could say or do basically whatever you like, and if anyone has a problem with it you can just tell them to go pound sand).
You could, under the current Trust system, use an alt account for this:If you're hesitant to say something controversial because you don't want it to be associated with your name, please create an alt account and say it.
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I think that they've caused more harm than good, but there's no arguing that they haven't done any good at all (because they definitely have, just, not enough to offset all of the life that I suspect they've choked out of the forum).
From what I've seen, many people aren't ready for freedom. They want someone to control things. This forum offers more freedom than any other forum I know, and I've seen ask people for more rules. I'm sometimes guilty of this myself. Users have asked to ban "offensive" speech, racism, mean words and more. In real life, governments make more and more rules, and it's very rare to remove any of them. So we see an ever increasing government involvement with more and more restrictions. Some are good (driving licenses and speed limits within city limits), other are questionable (you're not allowed to beat a burglar unless he beats you, and (I only found out now) you're not allowed to make fun of the Swiss). Back to the forum: I've never seen rules removed, only added. So I'm quite happy theymos sticks to the forum's mission "to be as free as possible".Quote
if you imagine the trust system without DT, and therefore without voting and everything that goes along with that, then it becomes harder to justify.)
In that scenario, I'd have to create a much larger Trust list to see the feedback from users who are now shown already.Quote
Remember, between me having no authority to do so, and me anyway being only ~70% serious about nuking DefaultTrust (I mean, I didn't actually send the PM-draft I quoted from), I don't think you have very much to worry about. 
As far as I know, theymos has never been happy with the Trust system, but it's the best there is so far. Create a better system, and I think you stand a good chance to get it implemented.This is almost 6 years ago:
I am never completely tied to anything, but let's try this for at least a few months and see how it works.
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[1] Roughly, posts made before the introduction of this "split" would be marked (in the database) with a 0. Past that point, posts made by the pro-police side would be marked with a 1, and posts made by the no-police side would be marked with a 2. The staff would have a 0+1+2 view of the forum. The pro-policers would have a 0+1 view of the forum. The no-policers would have a 0+2 view of the forum. Initially, everyone's view of the forum would agree, but, over time, old topics would diverge, and new topics would appear just on one side or the other. Probably it makes sense to give users the ability to sometimes see things the same way staff do (0+1+2), but the important point here is that because 0+1 (pro-police) users can't by default see what 0+2 (no-police) users are posting/doing, you can justifiably remove the ability for pro-policers to tag/flag/trust/distrust no-policers (after all, no-police content is meant only for guests and other no-policers, so there's no reasonable argument that a pro-policer can make that they should be able to have trust-wise interactions with users from the other side).
So basically half the forum will be shadow-banned from the other half I've never seen anything like it implemented on any forum (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist).Let's call it the Forum Fork! This will lead to endless discussions about which Fork is the real Bitcointalk
Mods will go nuts reading 2 different versions of a discussion, where half the participants can't read what the other half wrote. I'm not convinced this will be an improvement, but I'd love to see how it unfolds.Quote
I'm thinking about adding some logic to the post editor that warns you when you have unbalanced quote tags.
While you're add it, include the "list" tag: when it's incomplete, the forum adds a tag at the beginning (or end? I'm not sure) of the post to mess up everything.