I'd suspect that adding "forum politics" might be a bad idea in general. Too many ways it can go off the rails, whereas too few ways it's going to make a positive difference to the experience. Whatever you do, manual or automated, someone is going to game the system if that system gives them power over other users.
I think the best way to avoid toxic spillover is if the forum has a clear mission statement, then it's much easier to label stuff that goes against the rules. e.g. Stackoverflow has a bunch of automated moderating going on, and it works pretty well, generally, though some of them still misuse the system to be self-righteous assholes about particular coding conventions. With stackoverflow you earn points, call them karma, for being perceived as helpful, then, you can spend your karma, award people karma or earn more karma for doing things that improve the forum experience.
e.g. Stackoverflow has systems such as once you're at a high enough level, you can invest karma to edit someone else's post, and if two other moderators who have even higher karma agree that the edit is worthwhile, it gets permanently edited, with a message sent to the original user who posted that message. The original user is still able to respond or reject the edit, however the whole system rewards people who fix typos etc. Obviously, there's a complaint mechanism, e.g. if a user gains karma then starts to maliciously edit posts, their karma will be revoked and the edits will be reversed, and any other editors who ok'd the edits will be under scrutiny too. So, you can have a level of automated community self-policing, but you need a "buck stops here" mechanism of trusted users who check the checkers.
Personally, I don't think that elections are going to be any better than a system of upvoting/downvoting specific posts. On a board, you're going to attract a group of like-minded people, and someone coming into that with a contrary point of view will likely get downvoted to hell. If the alternative is to elect moderators, then you're probably going to get the same kind of thing happening, where someone gets control who mirrors the group biases, then non-conforming posts get marked for deletion.
Possibly, another way to filter complaints is to score each account user with a "credibility" rating. Let users mark various posts as troll/spam/illegal etc, then have a manual verdict. Accounts that repeatedly misuse the reporting system would drop in "credibility" for each complaint that they make. Also, allow users to +1 a post, then if the post turns out to be a questionable one that needs moderation, any users who +1'd that post would lose a little credibility. So if some spammer is spamming accounts to mod up their spam, there's an automatic system to filter them out as relevant accounts.
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Topic: Is this sort of thing feasible? (Read 2779 times)