Point of clarification: does banning a user on LW do anything but force them to create a new user account if they wish to keep contributing?
I have been using Wei_Dai’s awesome greasemonkey script for a while now to filter out some of the users I find valueless, so having them create multiple usernames to dodge the banhammer would be a mild nuisance for me.
So if that’s all it does, I’m somewhat opposed to it, but willing to remain neutral for the sake of not inconveniencing other people who don’t use that script for whatever reason.
OTOH, the responses to those users are themselves mildly annoying, so if the banhammer does something more worthwhile than that, then I might be in favor of it.
What about giving users the ability to apply a penalty to the score of posts from people they find uninteresting or aggravating, for the purpose of determining whether comments are hidden for that user? It could be inherited for one comment, or over the entire subtree, or perhaps decay according to some function.
This would, in general, hide comments from those users you object to as well as responses to them. The primary advantage it would have over outright blocks is that it would allow more space for someone to redeem themselves, and would let you catch interesting things in the responses when they do arise. A comment at +22 is likely interesting regardless of who posted it, and if you’ve seen some interesting posts from someone you’ve previously downgraded, you’ll probably think about relaxing that.
Edited to add: Note that if there seems to be a consensus on this, I’m willing to do the coding required.
I can’t ban users; I can ban comments. This makes them inaccessible to nonmod people. Creating a new username would only work against this for as long as it took to identify the new one as the same person.
Point of clarification: does banning a user on LW do anything but force them to create a new user account if they wish to keep contributing?
I have been using Wei_Dai’s awesome greasemonkey script for a while now to filter out some of the users I find valueless, so having them create multiple usernames to dodge the banhammer would be a mild nuisance for me.
So if that’s all it does, I’m somewhat opposed to it, but willing to remain neutral for the sake of not inconveniencing other people who don’t use that script for whatever reason.
OTOH, the responses to those users are themselves mildly annoying, so if the banhammer does something more worthwhile than that, then I might be in favor of it.
What about giving users the ability to apply a penalty to the score of posts from people they find uninteresting or aggravating, for the purpose of determining whether comments are hidden for that user? It could be inherited for one comment, or over the entire subtree, or perhaps decay according to some function.
This would, in general, hide comments from those users you object to as well as responses to them. The primary advantage it would have over outright blocks is that it would allow more space for someone to redeem themselves, and would let you catch interesting things in the responses when they do arise. A comment at +22 is likely interesting regardless of who posted it, and if you’ve seen some interesting posts from someone you’ve previously downgraded, you’ll probably think about relaxing that.
Edited to add: Note that if there seems to be a consensus on this, I’m willing to do the coding required.
I can’t ban users; I can ban comments. This makes them inaccessible to nonmod people. Creating a new username would only work against this for as long as it took to identify the new one as the same person.
Ah, gotcha.