Alkmaar
Quoted from visi0n:Watching pinball_keefer deactivate his account spawned this idea that I wanted to run by you. It is something I've been thinking about in the back of my mind for a bit. (Being a programmer and all )
So, the general tone of much of Pinside has changed over the years. There is still a helpful and enthusiastic core of appreciative pinball people here: Helpful and awesome people. They are here, for sure. But a vocal few exert an disproportionately negative force on many conversations.
The Ignore feature is brilliant (and brilliantly implemented). But, you have the encounter someone's jerkiness enough to really feel inclined to ignore them. By then, the damage is done and the conversation is devolved. What about something a little more pre-emptive? I'm thinking sort of a reputation-based ecosystem with some inherent auto ignore features. An expansion of sorts, on the basement.
The visualization in my head is something like the jungle
rainforest-interactive-for-3rd-grade-3-728_(resized).jpg
You have these layers. At the top, the emergent layer reaches the sunlight where birds and light-seeking critters generally dwell. At the bottom, the forest floor: It is dark, sometimes dangerous. The basement, basically.
The idea would be that pinsiders carry with them their reputation - a score that is born out of upvotes and downvotes and maybe the addition of something more specific, like (not-visible to the public) mini-reviews on pinsider posts (pinsiders ranking the quality of each other's posts) and informed by moderator scoring of specific pinside posts.
When you are looking at the forum, you have the option to pick your level of filtering. (Show me only the 1st two layers of the forest). OPs, when creating topics, can choose a minimum reputation score for a given thread to even participate in that thread. This way someone can post something positive like "Hey look at the awesome pin at this really great business" with a decreased likelihood of it being troll-jacked by the peanut gallery.
Reach out to the manufacturers / insiders again.. Goodwill to them an 'upper-canopy' auto reputation. Most (if not all) deserve it anyway for their contributions to this industry and putting up with all of the silliness. If users want to interact with the upper-canopy folks, they need to clean up their acts and earn their way into that class.
Conversations can be scored based on the quality of the reviews of responses and the reputation of the contributors, you can then filter out (optionally) super-trolly conversations if that's what you'd prefer (or avoid a thread altogether with a high troll score.) Trolls can then exist within their ecosystem, groaning and griping and crap-stirring with one another, while industry contributors can opt for a safer environment to have conversations that move pinball forward without being derailed by the negativity of repeat offenders...
of course, if they want to get out and go under the bridge and get their hands dirty, they can.
Anyway, just a thought. Correct me if this stuff already exists. I'm still finding and appreciating new Pinside features here and there.
Keep on' being awesome - if I can help you in any way - reach out to me, happy to help if I can.
Thanks for the suggestion, I really like the metaphor you are using. 
However, I'm not sure if a class system wouldn't be counter to what Pinside is trying to accomplish. If someone (a new member, for example) cannot post in a topic because he's too new, too low a class? The whole idea of Pinside is to promote the silver ball game through discussion between pinheads from all over the world. Disallowing people from posting in threads does not really fit that mission. Filtering out lower class posts also seems like a bit of a crude mechanism for the issue we're trying to solve, it's throwing out the baby wth the bathwater.
Quoted from visi0n:pinsiders ranking the quality of each other's posts
We tried, but our implementation of voting on post quality was too complex and bloated and it failed miserably. It was abandoned after 2 weeks.
Quoted from chrisjens2:I think an option where if you start a new thread, those who are on your "ignore" list are not allowed to post on your thread. This would be an option for the op of every thread before it posted to be viewed. It would save the moderators a lot of time and effort. Plus keep some of the more frequent trolls from derailing threads with their own agenda.
Interesting. Although I wonder if this wouldn't be giving individual posters too much power. I think we have to be careful about that.
Quoted from Black_Knight:The best way to reduce this behavior is to Not Feed the Trolls.
That is the intelligent way to approach it. But unfortunately it's also really hard for most people.
Quoted from Black_Knight:Up votes and down votes may not be as useful, as many use it to record their disagreement with the post, which is perfectly acceptable.
Agreed. And as such up- and downvotes on their own can not be used to measure trolling.
Quoted from Black_Knight:A simple way to achieve what you are asking for would be a Troll Meter and filter feature. Allow people to mark posts as troll bait and create an ignore function based on your openness to trolling, like top 1% or 5% of Troll 'offenders'. In addition you could automatically ignore individual posts that reach a particular troll rating.
My brother came up with the exact same solution this morning 
A simple button, with a troll icon, on each post to allow all of Pinside to help identify troll bait posts. Like one-click abuse report filing. But will it work? Won't people simply go and over-use it on every post? It would need some kind of limit.
Another idea that we've had for a while is sub-forum ejects. the same as a thread eject, but now you can't post to any topic in a sub-forum for x days (or even permanent). This would only be for the real persistent trolls, who can't help themselves but keep posting their same opinion in each and every topic on a subject.
All in all, I'm pretty sure some technical solutions could be cooked up, but the trick is to make it insusceptible to fraud or abuse itself. Oh and keep them super simple, like the ignore feature.
