There was a forum I used to lurk on. I hardly ever posted, but there were still some posters who were so annoying that I had to block them anyway, to not get aggravated while reading the good posters. In fact I remember now, it was worse than that. The forum software for some reason only let you block a maximum of 10 accounts at a time, and there were far more than 10 annoying posting accounts (though maybe fewer people behind them) at any given time. I ended up having to write my own software to ignore enough accounts. I had first resisted ignoring, but once I gave in to the feature, I went nuts with it and it was great.
That was a really good forum that became useless when trolls overran it. The owners fixed it by charging a one-time $5(?) fee to get an account (existing users didn’t have to pay). If they banned a troll account, they couldn’t really stop the troll from paying up to join again, but few bothered doing that. So that worked quite well and was a big relief. Not counting the trolls, it was an intense and nerdy forum that legitimate participants didn’t mind paying to join. It was eventually shut down with its archives deleted even though the parent site is still around. I don’t know why they did that and I think its archives could have some significant historical value. Oh well.
Edit: I may be mis-remembering how the fee worked. It might be that you had to be a paying member of the parent site, since I do remember sending money, though that might have been to access some unrelated site features.
There was a forum I used to lurk on. I hardly ever posted, but there were still some posters who were so annoying that I had to block them anyway, to not get aggravated while reading the good posters. In fact I remember now, it was worse than that. The forum software for some reason only let you block a maximum of 10 accounts at a time, and there were far more than 10 annoying posting accounts (though maybe fewer people behind them) at any given time. I ended up having to write my own software to ignore enough accounts. I had first resisted ignoring, but once I gave in to the feature, I went nuts with it and it was great.
That was a really good forum that became useless when trolls overran it. The owners fixed it by charging a one-time $5(?) fee to get an account (existing users didn’t have to pay). If they banned a troll account, they couldn’t really stop the troll from paying up to join again, but few bothered doing that. So that worked quite well and was a big relief. Not counting the trolls, it was an intense and nerdy forum that legitimate participants didn’t mind paying to join. It was eventually shut down with its archives deleted even though the parent site is still around. I don’t know why they did that and I think its archives could have some significant historical value. Oh well.
Edit: I may be mis-remembering how the fee worked. It might be that you had to be a paying member of the parent site, since I do remember sending money, though that might have been to access some unrelated site features.