I've kept track of Ratimov's meltdown since one of his broken-english insults made me laugh out loud: "Go fuck yourself, you piece of cocksucker."
(Like so many of his other posts, that one is deleted, but JollyGood quoted it
here.)
Even though that was back in July, I still can't believe just how
quickly Ratimov managed to ruin his account; he seems to have gone out of his way to basically take a high-altitude nosedive straight into the ground.
I've been deliberating on removing the positive feedback that I left him in August (but decided against it; I think I err on the side of keeping old feedback unchanged. I mean, given his radical change in stance towards the forum, I do kind of regret having left him positive feedback, but he
was helpful and polite when I dealt with him, so I can't think of a legitimate reason to remove that feedback). I've also considered leaving him new negative feedback, but he's banned now, so I can't see that accomplishing anything.
I found the petulant destruction of so much forum content to be quite disturbing. It made me think of some potential countermeasures against similar temper tantrums in the future:
(1) Maybe posts
shouldn't be able to be edited/deleted (except by mods/admins, of course). (I mean, I know this one is probably a step too far, but it does have some nice knock-on effects, like curbing various forum misbehaviors, and making it much easier to get to the bottom of contentious situations without the need for third-party forum archives. The initial post in a topic would probably need to be special-cased, as not being able to edit the OP would get pretty tiresome.)
(2) Maybe posts shouldn't be able to be edited/deleted once they've been merited? (This one has a nice symmetry/feel to it: merited posts are presumably worth reading or otherwise contain something of value, so "freezing" them once they've been merited makes sense, IMO. This would need the same special-casing as (1): editing a merited OP should still be allowed.)
(3) Maybe deleting merited posts should "undo" the merit and refund the sender(s)? (I kind of like the tit-for-tat here: if posters have the power to remove useful content, then merit-givers should have some mechanism to get those sMerits back. But, this interacts poorly with self-moderated topics, and gives those topic-starters the power to sometimes "delete" another user's merits. I guess that could be special-cased, but it would be pretty clumsy/awkward.)
(4) Maybe the amount of activity/rank that you lose by deleting a post should be on a percentage-based curve? (That is, after you've deleted something like 5% of your posts, you should start "de-ranking" superlinearly. I mean, this wouldn't have dissuaded Ratimov, but it might make saner users think twice before deleting a bunch of their posts.)
Anyway, just some thoughts I had.
Hope everyone's enjoying their end-of-year; I'm gonna get back to sitting in my comfy chair and "grading" my whiskies.