Thanks. Honestly I’m thankful that we haven’t had to use this or the topic for Vlad’s Alternate History topic to the extent I thought we might. For whatever reason, Putin’s 10-Ruble Army from the IRA and the Useful Idiots have stayed away or were inactive or banned long ago.
We’ve been informally experimenting with catch-all/reference topics for a while to handle endlessly re-hashed and tiresome meta-topics that tend to de-rail. These aren’t the first topics like this. See also the ones about Guillotine images, the limits of Free Speech, hand-wringing over the term Karens, and concerns that BB is publicising the idiocy of certain American fascists. Combined with the TL4 ability to move comments they’ve kept a bunch of topics on-topic and reduced the clean-up workload for the moderator while still allowing room for discussion and debate on those matters.
I’m not sure if this can be automated on the BB instance, let alone for your other customers. The anti-patterns are identified by community members and the topics set up by trusted TL3+ members. A lot of the existing features already make them easy to set up and manage and categorise. All I can think of are cosmetics and labels to make such topics stand out from the others and perhaps an official moderator’s “seal of approval”. Maybe some back-end analytics tools for the mods that will help them identify the anti-patterns and the users who indulge in them? I’ll bet the Discourse team can come up with other ideas.
