Before, our only choices for dealing with bad comments was to ban or disemvowel. But now! Now we have some more tools so it's not so all-or-nothing.
First, is warning. Users will see that they're warned, and get linked to the community policy—a set of rules that they need to familiarize themselves with if they want to keep commenting here.
Then, there's thread moving. That's what we do if we think a comment is so egregious that it deserves both a warning and a moving to a tagpage, so it's not cluttering up the discussion. Here are the main five tagpages we'll be moving to.
• #trollpatrol. Originally we used this tag for identifying trolls, but we'll throw actual trolls in there as well. But please, continue using that as a place to show us where the trolls are.
• #fanboys. Another obvious tagpage. This isn't for people who use and enjoy products, it's for people who lose their damn minds over a brand or idea and are blind to any other options or dissenting opinions. You should know who these are.
• #timeout. A place where we send commenters that need a little time away from typing words into boxes in order to think about whether or not this is the right place for them. This goes with a 7-day suspension—something milder than a ban, but still serves the purpose of telling them that we don't like what they're doing with their comments.
• #phantomzone. If you make uninformed, stupid or otherwise lousy comments, this is where that comment will be. Say hi to Zod.
• #whitenoise. Offtopic discussions go here. If a post is about keyboards and you talk about picking out new curtains, we'll escort you over here.
• #dev/null. I just came up with this one, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to use it quite often.
We'll also create various tags on the fly if we think they fit your comment better. For example, if you like making comments before reading the actual post, we'll move you to #RTFA. If you're a person who likes to advertise your own website on all your comments, we'll move you to #spam. And so on.
When we get the ability to copy comments in addition to moving them, we can do stuff like #commentoftheday, or #windowstip. Until then, be good, and keep on commenting. If you're new, head here to check out our guidelines.