Feedback New Proposal for dealing with Insults

Hello folks,

As most of you know, we are one of the most leniently moderated Gambling sites in the world. This is important in order to ensure our members feel 100% at liberty to share their opinions, no matter how controversial. However, when those opinions just become insults, they tend to derail threads and transform topics into flame wars and actually become counter-productive to open discussions. We initially created the Insults Graveyard to attempt to deal with this by moving posts containing insults away from the threads at hand, but that has clearly not acted as much of a deterrent and just created more work for us. So we are exploring new ways of dealing with insults in our community to encourage and foster a higher level of debate in our community.

One of the options we are exploring is quite unique and we have never seen it in any gambling site before, but we believe it provides a more effective and balanced approach.

Basically, instead of doing nothing to the members that repeatedly violate our #1 Rule (be respectful) by insulting other members and derailing threads, and instead of banning them like other communities do which limits their freedom to express themselves, we are proposing something in the middle: temporarily frustrating their user experience as punishment.

So, for example, we would issue a warning for every insult. Every 3 warnings would lead to growing but temporary punishment periods where the offending member would have their user experience frustrated.

What do we mean by frustrated? Well, instead of every page loading instantly, it would take -- say -- 20 seconds for every page to load. So they would still be able to participate and use our site like before, but during their "punishment", they would waste a lot of time waiting for each page to load, giving them ample time to reflect on their behavior. During that punishment period, we could also randomly redirect the offending members to a message reminding them that it's not worth it to insult other members.

Of course, egregious rule violators, such as those caught with multiple accounts but who refuse to confess, would still be banned. This is more for those who break less detrimental rules, such as insulting or throwing a thread off-topic.

The idea is to find a deterrent that's effective enough to make repeat offenders reconsider their ways, while not depriving them of the ability to express themselves. We would still move reported posts containing insults to the Insults Graveyard to keep threads clean an on-topic.

How does this new approach sound?