This is why you need activist admins rather than (or in addition to) automation.
Newbies often don’t know enough to know how much they don’t know, especially if they have experience in other online discussions, especially if their experience is limited to a small number of other discussions which run in a more aggressive mode. They need to be given a bit of space to learn what is and isn’t appropriate.
So I agree that we want to catch patterns that look like a problem and educate the users. But I disagree that “the first hour” is a sufficient test – the real question is whether they are capable of correcting their behavior after they’ve been told what they’re doing wrong.
If they can’t correct it after having been told what the issue is and why it’s considered a problem, then I don’t much mind losing them.
On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, sometimes the newcomer is an expert and we WANT those 25 replies in the same topic. There has to be a human in the loop to make a judgement call about whether the pattern violation is justified or not, or you’re going to lose people you will really regret losing.
If running a good BBS was easy, there would be more good BBS’s and this one might not have felt a need to start.
