Apologies if this has been asked before, a search didn’t turn anything up.
Say a contentious topichas a couple people essentially saying the same thing over and over again without actually discussing anything, talking over the top of each other. They’re not doing anything ban-worthy, and moderator posts trying to steer things in a more productive direction aren’t helping.
Is there a way or a plugin to prevent just those users from replying further to just that topic?
Slow mode helps when a lot of people are getting heated, but when it’s just a couple people saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” repeatedly, slow mode is unfair to everyone else participating in the thread productively.
What I want, as a moderator, is a way to say “ok, you’ve made your point and this conversation is not productive, it’s time for you to move on from this thread” but actually give that statement enforcement. I can say that, but if my only option for enforcement is a ban, it’s toothless, and so it usually gets ignored
Yeah absolutely, you’ve got to give it some teeth, perhaps if they ignore it silence them for a day and ramp up actions from there.
But to answer the general question, there’s currently not a way to apply user or group based restrictions on a topic level. You could create a group, add them to it, and then prevent the group from replying to topics in the whole category… but understandable if that’s too broad.
There’s a related request here: Restrict Topic to Specific Users — but note it would be a fairly complex feature to implement, so it’s unlikely something we’ll be able to prioritize unless we get many requests for it.
Are you sure? As I understand it, slow mode only hurts people saying a lot. It only imposes a delay between one person’s post and their own previous post. Other people can post unhindered, if they only post once or if they are not posting rapidly.
At present this Plugin is likely the closest in desured function
There is also plugin that adds ability to to mods & category Mods to silence/ban by category. But you in your premise you said topic conteoll. This function could maybe be feature requested in that plugin for Mods
