I respect the difficult job that moderators have. Back when I was getting infracted more regularly, I was often surprised on which of my posts got infracted and which escaped infractions. I think there is sometimes obvious trolling going on. Sometimes it starts as relatively harmless stuff in politically charged threads, but then it crosses an obvious line and gets very personal. That can be difficult for the attacked person to ignore or not respond in kind and for others (especially on the same side of the debate) to resist the urge to white knight.
I think the solution is to infract the ugliest stuff and warn, with plenty of publicly viewable modtext, the responses that are close to or slightly over the line, but are being given a break because of the context. I am against permabanning of known trolls as some would think of me as one. I kind of know what some posters are getting at in regards to known trolls, but my personal solution is whatever level of mockery I think I can get away with or live with the infractions if I don't get away with it.
I'm with Valka on getting back access to our infraction history. It was fun going back and reading those threads several years out and my history gave me easy access tp find them.
I also concur that we should have access to our infraction history. If nothing else, it will allow us to see where we've gone off the rails, and improve our behaviour, which is supposedly the point of handing out infractions instead of just banning people left and right.
I think posters should be given a fair bit of leeway to responding to personal attacks. Trolls are trying to provoke a response, and personal attacks tend to provoke knee-jerk responses. By infracting a person for responding to, hypothetically, a person accusing them of violent crime, by snapping and telling the troll that they would like to commit a violent crime right now, if only the troll were within arm's reach, you're only
rewarding the troll and punishing the sensible user, who has snapped due to the excessive provocation. Yes, the poster's response is over the top; but it is in the nature of personal attacks that they provoke over the top responses. The mods can tell us to be calm and sensible all they want; the fact is, such attacks are designed to penetrate calm.
I also believe we need more mod text. As a lurker in World History, I would often end up chasing threads down the rabbit hole whenever a new user necro-bumped a ten year old thread (incidentally, those threads were often better than the few threads currently existing in World History, although a certain Polish poster ruined many of them), and it seems to me that mods were far more willing to leave warnings and mod text in the past. Maybe that's just a World History thing, maybe the multi-page threads on Hitler, Napoleon, and other topics that tended to require moderation are just more likely to get bumped, and I'm suffering from selection bias. If a discussion appears to be getting out of hand, a mod leaving a message like "knock it off fellas, remember not to insult each other's mothers" could be enough to calm the conversation. At the very least, it indicates that if said mother insults continue, there aren't any excuses; you've been warned.
Personally I am very much in favour of banning known trolls. I think everyone deserves a second chance, maybe even a third. But if, as happened in the situation that has immediately provoked this discussion, a poster is suspended for trolling, then returns from suspension and
immediately begins trolling again, they've lost the presumption of innocence, or ignorance, or even stupidity; they are trolling, they need to go. If a poster flames another by repeatedly accusing them of being a violent drunk, they need to go. If a poster follows other posters from thread to thread, abusing them in multiple threads simultaneously, they need to go. And anyone who occasionally snaps at them in frustration shouldn't be punished for doing so, because that is simply rewarding the troll. And rewarding a troll encourages a troll.
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