Eriul said:
The forums are much better without people like alpha and growler but there are still blatant trolls who ruin threads and derail conversation. The foe button is fine but when posters like alpha or growler constantly started/derailed every conversation, ignoring posts doesn't fix the issue.
I have an extremely hard time believing that permanently banning accounts who are clear trolls is difficult. I'm not sure how this forum is modded but the elimination of an account should be an easy thing to do.
Surprisingly, it's not. You can drop an IP ban, but there's multiple ways to get around that (ie: use your phone, at work, sometimes your IP at home doesn't stay the same, etc). And in some cases if you drop an IP ban it can have an unintended splash consequence.. like as I mentioned above, the IP that Brock Landers was posting from had two other eGrizzers (good posters) attached to it. Back when AOL was a thing Growler's IP address used to be attached to about 10 different eGrizzers (that weren't one of numbnuts' dozen accts) that were regular posters. You can perm ban an acct, but then you go out and register a new email address and new forum acct, and bam, back in business. Same with perm banning an email address.
It's tough to be real granular with the software the board provides. We've been able to head off some of people who are perm bans by approving their post first post (something we put in place about a year ago to head off spammers and perm bans) but that's not always fool proof either. Plus with that method it adds a lot of overhead for the mods to deal with but we still do it.