> By keeping mum, you also lose the scare effect, though OTOH that might keep the "I'll just create a bunch of accounts" folks down. Exactly: if someone is ma

> By keeping mum, you also lose the scare effect, though OTOH that might keep the "I'll just create a bunch of accounts" folks down. Exactly: if someone is making consistently bad flaggings on one account, you don't want to tip them off and have them flee to a new account. > A third risk is that legitimate marks no longer get made because the potential marker doesn't want to risk the ban. However, if the ban is ONLY on the use of the mark as inappropriate button and not for anything else, then I doubt it would actively scare users. You'll note that my proposal does not include a ban of anything, not even the "mark as inappropriate" button. I just suggest letting the bad users keep putting in their bad ratings, and using that information in the opposite manner as they intended. You could even have some sort of Bayesian (naive or Markovian, depending on your computing resources and scaling needs) classifier set up to see what words or phrases in a post make any given user more likely to mis-rate. Then you could separate out a user's probably-bad ratings from their probably-good ones.