A detailed description of good faith vs. bad faith posting from Boing Boing, who has the longest running public Discourse instance in the world.. if anyone would know, they would!
“Bad-faith” from a moderation context is:
- Violating our community guidelines. That’s an easy and obvious one.
- Posting something with the specific intent of riling up the community instead of participating. This necessarily requires some way to tell that the user likely does not believe what they are saying.
- A consistent pattern of taking the “devil’s advocate” position on multiple topics. We’ve had several bad-actors do this specifically - they always took the contrarian point specifically to rile up the community.
- Repeated feigning personal involvement with topics - that improbably, a user is part of every minority, that they’ve done every thing, that every issue is personal for them. We’ve had bad actors do this specifically, as well.
- Traditional sealioning - coming into a discussion, demanding that it go only one way, and that people expressly refute their position, dismissing all others.
The mods point out that all the above negative behaviors should be responded to via flag 
and not the reply button! Replies are encouragement, that’s you saying “yes please, let’s have more of this”.