I think FW should have warning points for all. Everyone starts at zero. Different offense results in different penalty points. If the poster wishes to discuss with the staff further he/she can do so through pm and senior mod can decide to reverse the points or not. Accumulating more points will cause lost of voting privilege, or not being able to post in forum for x amount of days and etc..

Likewise, doing something good/becoming a good citizen to FW forum (now this is very subjective but maybe we can make a vote on what makes someone to deserve it) results in removal of points bringing you closer to negative warning points

Flaming
Spamming (those membership referal, repeating post multiple times etc)
Discussing Illegal Activity (Coupon fraud, return item after getting rebate etc)
Self promotion (selling, asking others to vote for you so you can benefit from it etc)
Harassment (either through pm or forum)
Troll/Goblin whatever you want to call it

What does everyone think of this? Please add more offense you like to see.

Maybe mod-bot could handle this job!

Sounds like too much trouble to do and I agree that it's very subjective. One might argue that giving someone a negative vote is grounds for starting a flame war and so that user should be penalized. I think it would get old and silly pretty quickly.

Some situations are pretty straight forward. You can tell if someone is spamming re feral. You can tell if someone is flaming or trolling by coming into a thread and just intentionally creating off topic discussion, using vulgar rude language etc. Off course there are many gray area situation which is why a user can discuss further their actions with the mod to clarify and reverse the warning or not.

The overall idea is to keep track of user warnings, have a baseline on consequences. My past experience have seen mods are usually more than willing to listen, compromise and understand the actions a user make. It also puts onus on a mod as to why a user got such and such warning. Mods should not be able to just suspend voting or temporary ban or whatever without a solid reason. They can review user history and decide pass warnings.

TM1 said:Maybe mod-bot could handle this job!

Bring back Mod-Bot!

We have newer mods that weren't on FW during the Mod-Bot days, and probably have no idea who/what Mod-Bot is.

TM1 said:Here is the problem I see with this...mods are all different in their modding style. What one mod considers the end of the world, another mod shrugs it off. I can't work.

I agree with that TM1, different mods have different styles for sure.