forums Further Member Tools to Combat Abuse

The only blocking mechanism available currently is the reporting of posts. But what about members who repeatedly troll the forums, flat-out spamming? It would be quite a pain trying to report all his/her posts, particularly if they've made around 100. Should there be a mechanism that blocks trolls that flat-out spam, preventing them from posting until a mod's further notice?

Nope. I don't think anyone's particularly eager to give out ban tools en mass…

The best way to deal with a mass spam "attack" is to PM the moderator saying "someone's spamming up the forum <link to example post>" — or you can just report one and say that there's more in the comment. There's really no merit to reporting every single one of the posts. Also, if there's a local mod they'll likely notice as soon as they view the forum.

Edit: ninja'd

The potential for abuse of this is too great. As stated, it's very rare for a situation to require immediate attention. Should you feel immediate attention is required, there's almost always at least one supermod online if you don't see a forum, section, or category mod on that can address the situation.

Being able to suspend a member's posting privileges, either temporarily or permanently, has always been and always will be a moderator exclusive feature. To have this sort of power requires a certain level of trust that it will not be misused, thus opening something like this up to the general populace won't be happening.

Supers and Cat mods are quite active on checking out queue's now, while it would be nice to have, most of the time the one report is enough to set us off in the right direction if we see a larger spread of posts. Also our tools are sufficient to handle cross forum spam (we don't do it 1 at a time in the profile).

As far as tools go though, we have sufficient ability to stop bad members in their tracks and we're improving upon that execution with each upgrade to the site to bring them to a halt even faster. Allowing members to suspend accounts would be far too much power to just throw around, if we're talking about a trusted user base, wouldn't they already be mods at that point anyway if we're giving out that level of responsibility?

As for a dedicated list of potential spammers or abusers, pretty sure it would be excess to have a report log for potential troublesome accounts and reports of their posts as well given we'd build 2 queues for exactly the same issue. :/

Promoting a rule to ban yourself, eh?

Mods can do this just fine, so I see no need for it.