Humans need intermediate punishments. It's how we work. (Homeostasis and all that.) Therefore Facebook (etc) ought to provide a very automatic "time-out" syste

Humans need intermediate punishments. It's how we work. (Homeostasis and all that.) Therefore Facebook (etc) ought to provide a very automatic "time-out" system for moderators allowing them to one-click to create a temporary ban (a week, a month) for a user that reinstates that user automatically after that period without further action by the moderator. Automatic tracking of past penalties and auto-escalations (if desired) to harsher punishments up to a ban would be a good idea, too. A quick display of relevant stats regarding that user would be helpful right then, too; giving you some rough idea of how valuable past contributions by them have been. (Sometimes what looks like a troll is just a fact that few people, even in the field, know.) Manually managing such a system works but Lord is it a ton of fiddly (and unnecessary) work for the moderator. One of the advantages of this is that mild penalties can usually make the point with little risk that a bad penalty decision will permanently piss-off a valuable contributor.