Good and Welfare -- CorD community

Recently, CorD has seen a low level of activity, much of it consisting of hostile exchanges between two or three people.

I am in favor of very liberal posting policies on CorD because I find that often people mix legitimate ideas with flaming, and the replies and counter replies sometimes raise important issues. (I tried to bring out some of those that I found in the most recent flamewar/discussion, but my comment was deleted along with most of the other comments on that thread. ;))

But I also recognize that flame wars, or even just constant slamming, carping, bickering, etc. can create an atmosphere in which new people and those who are not involved in the disputes are less likely to participate.

The best solution is to promote a friendly, collaborative approach and "crowd out" flame wars with good discussions.

But maybe we can try another approach, too. What if we enabled registered users -- or users who have been involved with the site for some period of time, or some other sign of commitment to CorD -- to tag/stic posts on the basis of how "flame-y" they are? That would give the community (how many of us are there?) a way to signal our feelings about the posts. The posts that reach a specified threshold of "flame-aliciousness" could also be moved to a special forum for no holds barred, tit for tat, I know you are but what am I... dialogue. Not deleted, just categorized.

There are many tools available: http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/60

I've said it a few times before, but isn't this what makes drupal useful? The community tools? Why not use them here?