The reason I don't believe in /ban is because it is the kind of heavy-handed action that just gets trolls going even more. /ignore is a peer-to-peer action, which does not tend to get a troll going with conspiracy fantasies. I noticed the other day that when you told masturbator that you were leaving the chatbox because he'd logged on, he immediately reacted with anger and name-calling -- but directed exclusively towards you and not the site in general. In contrast, a /ban reeks of a power play, and might focus a troll's efforts to taking down a site (not necessarily hacking it but at the least filling it with garbage and spam, forcing the moderators into escalation).

Trolls can be pretty dedicated once they pick a target -- frankly, I'd rather the target be an individual user (endless /msgs) then the site as a whole. Then again, KM might disagree strongly.

P.S. I also like the idea of a list somewhere of the uids i've /ignored -- otherwise i'll eventually forget who to /unignore.

e-mail neshura

Trolls can be pretty dedicated once they pick a target

The name Purl Gurl comes to mind....

btw--I agree about the list of ignored users. A box on the User Settings page would be cool.

I can think of two possibilities, either of which would work pretty well;

1. Implement a /ban that lasts somewhere between 1 hour and 24 hours. (12 hours?) The /ban can be implemented by any bishop or higher. It's unlikely that any of our bishops will be judged unsuitable; if enough people complained about misuse of the /ban by any specific user, I'm sure vroom would be willing to block that user from the function.

2. Implement the /ban on a voting system. If more than half of the current users (those listed in the "Other Users" box) /ban a user, that user is banned for 1 hour. The ban is short enough that most abusers won't be willing to hang around long enough to keep it permanent; the group here is, I believe and sincerely hope, not rotten enough to be able to implement too many unjust bans, anyway.

What do you guys think?

- Ozymandias

If you were to incluse the /ban, as Ozymandias suggests, this is what I think:
I like his #1 solution, and I think that is actually a GREAT idea.
But I don't think that second one is suitable.
You say, "If more than half of the current users (those listed in the 'Other Users' box) /ban a user, that user is banned for 1 hour."
I notice that often, people tell me that the chatterbox is ut of their view when they have several windows open at once.
So say there are 10 users logged on, but 6 of them are not using/seeing the chatterbox.
This would render it impossible to ban a user, because only 4 users would /ban that user.
But maybe if you were to say if 1/3 of the users /baned a user, THEN ban them.
Just another one of my opinions :-)