I agree that moderating trolls and limited return-trolls is important.
I cannot say I'm sure that this kind of defacing benefits the site more than it punishes the troll. I think it just looks weird to the irregular user, whom doesn't know that such a person is trolling.
Should we use the 'protected' status to lock-down a question and prevent trolls from downvoting people, etc.?
This particular user has asked some pretty intriguing questions, but the user seems to be more interested in luring other ELUers into spinning their wheels and wasting their time, as opposed to wanting to learn anything about language. The user has also been known to engage in some pretty egregious behavior, such as publishing phone numbers of other members.
The comment that you saw was simply meant to alert regular users that they shouldn't spend a lot of time answering that question, since it was probably going to be end up ultimately deleted anyway.
You bring up a good point, though: Relative newcomers might have trouble reconciling what looked like a harshly inappropriate message with what seemed like a good question. It's something that's just become part of the culture.
I indeed wanted to warn people from getting drawn into our troll’s webs, and my comments and close-votes were not doing the job.
As J.R. correctly surmised, the problem was that it had begun to draw flies, meaning that it was luring the unsuspecting into its devices, and we had neither a moderator nor enough high-rep users on hand to quickly take out the trash.
Yes, it was probably a bit extreme, and I do see why new users become confused. But after flouting the rules not just a five or ten or even a few dozens times, but thousands of times, and going far worse than that even, there seems unlikely to be reversal of judgement from the Powers That Be on this matter this side of hell freezing over.
After all the many-times-daily violations for more than a year running, and after all that we’ve all suffered here, if said Powers were to renege on their position that the ban is valid and it stays, then they would be rewarding bad behavior, not to mention direct violations of their own written policies — and just for once, it really would feel like the terrorists had won.
So let’s not do that.
I think the question is fine. And I think a question should be judged on its own merits, not on whoever asks it. I have flagged it to be undeleted. Only real spam should be marked as such: an OK question by a user with a history should never be marked as spam. As to real spam, yes, that should be defaced. But this is not it.
