That is a tough one. After reading the topic, complaints about the title are somewhat warranted. It just depends how far down the rabbit hole people go with it. In this case, a bit too far.
I don’t know that we could automate this one, all we can do is encourage folks to flag the really off topic posts for mod attention.
The public reminders from mods are quite helpful as posts in the topic. Could that be made easier via a “value menu” of common mod replies? Perhaps but I hope it wouldn’t be so frequently necessary and a human touch of composed text is always better.
Also, @neil is working on a topic level flag button so hopefully people can feel less stigma about flagging an individual person’s post versus flagging the topic itself. It is a little worse from a mod perspective because it’s like “look at this whole topic” versus “look at this specific post” but if given the choice between no flag due to unwillingness to flag a person, and a broad more-work topic level flag, I would much rather have the flag. Moderation only scales with the community if everyone is pitching in to find and address trouble spots.
