Wedge

Perhaps you have a Moderator gone rogue and had to action him or her in a manner that caused a post to be ghosted. Though that's easily taken care of by having ghost set as highest priority. I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of secondary tags not what would be considered a core item stacking up.

That would be pretty great. The ability to individually flag posts could have a great many uses. Flagging a post as correct in a thread of particularly useful which would change it's style to draw attention could be cool. The ability to jump to certain types of flagged posts in a thread similar to how on the wow forums you can jump ahead in a 60 page thread to one posted by a community manager for instance.

Could be a good way to help users quickly find information they might be looking for in a large thread instead of wading through post after post to find it. Moderators could flag a certain post and it'd maybe throw up a button at the top of the thread somewhere with a custom title that'd take you to said post.

A hundred years ago when I worked on starmen.net's forums we had perhaps 500 active users daily it was necessary to jail some users. We were using FudForum at the time and I had created a Jail'd user group which would take priority over all other permissions aside from administrative permissions and effectively jail a user. Giving them access to the Jail forum that no one else would normally see where they could plead their case and a moderator would answer.

It was extremely effective. We went from banning 2 or 3 people a week to 2 or 3 people a month.

Edit: maybe it was more like 100 active users, but it was a lot :P

Ouch that's true I can see it getting very bogged down very quickly. I wish I had a good answer for that. There's the evercookie approach but ultimately that'd fail to a persistent user.

Oh no I got it I was referring to the tools I've got available to me right now. The idea of replacing bans with account level sanctions is great. So long as I have a way to effectively hide that user from the rest of the population. The ability to ghost all his or her posts/threads, make them not show up in the member list to unsanctioned members etc.

If those types of sanctions are something they can't see themselves they are more likely to just go away on their own accord because they appear to be ignored rather than raising a stink and getting the reaction they want from the current members.

As a diehard user of SMF who has used SMF for everything from a normal forum to various content management systems on dozens of sites across the internet one of the most irksome things I've had to deal with is the banning system.

Let's take for instance a site that's being hammered and I mean absolutely hammered by Chinese spam bots. I ban an IP Range, good, don't need to see that one here again, move on to the next. and so on and so forth until I've got a list of ban triggers (A concept which I love) 3 to 4 pages long.

I go to another forum I host and I see it having the same problem. Maybe it's running a slightly different version of SMF or maybe it's already got a few bans in the system or what-have-you, but now I'm forced to re-enter all those bans again, by hand. It's so time consuming I had to write a system that'd let me inject them into the list directly via the database.

I would die, 10 fold if the system were as easy as that, if I could just edit a list of CIDR's like this
And just add another CIDR to the list, it would save me hours of work.