So this is something that's been cropping up recently, and while I think we're justified in doing this under moderator discretion, I'd rather put it forward for our userbase to discuss.
Basically: every now and then a group of kids/university students/bored 9-5 workers decide it's a good idea to come here and abuse the forum. Usually, we end up getting a slow trickle of low-quality posters, often registering from the same IP (range) or e-mail addresses from the same institutional domain. Sometimes, it's a bit of a burden from a moderation perspective. Just yesterday I've had to ban
Kingsway College School because new kids kept joining the forum just about as fast as I could clean up their posts. Today, it's
Mariemont City Schools whose students had the same idea.
I suggest that, as a policy, we should reserve the right to
temporarily block access from institutions whose members choose to abuse our forum. For example, if a group of schoolkids chooses to post about how the Earth is
totally a cube (lacking the decency to do so in CN), we should have a well-defined right to ban that school for some time. Individual posters, of course, should still be handled separately to this - this is more an idea to throttle brigading a bit.
Obviously this is a very rough idea, and a lot of the specifics would have to be agreed, but I'd like to at least get an idea of whether or not this is something that users here would be willing to accept.