There is another way too. You can give members a flag button. If x amount of people flag that post it is automatically deleted. It makes it easier on the mods. This is a big forum and they can’t be expected to see each post and sometime members may not even see them or want to take the time to report them through the abuse feature. When maybe 10 people flag a post, it can be automatically deleted or the mods can take a look and decide. It makes it easier for them than checking every single abuse report.
I saw some of the original thread and the only one in the email to Jim that I thought was out of line was calling the child a whore.
Wouldn’t work. We already have about ten trolls from the DailyKos mindset doing guerilla comments on several posts (usually identifiable by their joined-within-the-last-few-days date tags) and a concerted effort by the DU-mmies would make things intolerable quite quickly.