Huh. And here I was thinking that if I maybe type kike or nigger every now and then I'd start to fit in.
If the problem is that the people who shit up the threads are trying to make a scene and derail the conversation, maybe one thing you could try is have regular and sane contributors manually put on a list who can post normally - generally the people who post or comment and leave it or who can have a back and forth and disagree without resorting to being belligerent. Everyone else who is logged in can comment, but they cannot start new posts, tag or quote people, their comments are automatically minimised for everyone else and need to be clicked to be read, until a moderator decides they can be a trusted with regular privileges. The admission process then becomes a test of conduct, not one's political views. This would allow people to ignore shitposters, prevent pointless vendettas, and allow moderators to filter people at their own pace without it technically being censorship. Maybe article threads could have a timer of 30 days before they get auto-locked to prevent the inexplicable necroing going on.
Then maybe remove the negative stickers completely - nobody will whine about downvotes, and they wont get baited by negative feedback - they'll just get silence. Maybe if a minimised post gets enough positive stickers, it would become visible as a sort of reward, so old users wanting to be regular contributors to A&H just need to behave or be recognised by friends.
Fuck it, I'll never start my own lolcow thread, so I may as well offer myself as mod if it's not too late. My qualifications are, nobody here knows me, I think American politics is fascinating, bizarre and very silly and I hate banning people.
