Since the topic has been split off and allows for the possibility of less trivial modifications to Discourse than the one suggested above*, let me suggest a functionality which might work as an alternative to the Bad Faith flag down the road.
I’ve often thought that an “Ignore” button for specific users might prove helpful to the mods/admins in addition to making the BBS experience even better for the user. The idea would be that a user could ignore/block/hide the comments of any other user he chose. There would be no public tally of how many “Ignores” a particular user got, but the mods/admins might be alerted behind the scenes via back-end analytics if a given user passed a certain threshold so they could pay closer attention and perhaps submit some private queries to TL3 users about the reasons for pushing “Ignore” on that user.
This might be accompanied by a “Favourite/Follow” functionality that does the opposite: highlighting a given user’s comments for a given member or alerting the user to a new comment from that person. Perhaps exceeding a certain threshold of “followers” might contribute to that person’s elevation to a higher trust level.
I realise this kind of feedback functionality is a longer-term project, but thought I’d throw it out there as a way of helping the mods/admins do their already good work even more efficiently and effectively.
[^ thanks to Jason and the rest of the team for soliciting user feedback like this]
