I seriously doubt that both harassment and spam is a much of a problem as Mozilla, or others make it out to be. That's not to say that it's not a huge issue for a subset of people and it should be dealt with, to some extend.
If someone want to harass you online, they will find a way, regardless of what governance or censorship you put in place.
Interesting. Do you have experience moderating a comparable community, or what leads you to believe that it's not as much of a problem as they make it out to be?
I'm sure it will always be possible to find a way to harass someone. But do you believe putting barriers in place has no effect on the amount of harassment that targets have to endure? What do you think of the computer security concept of "defense in depth"?
Couldn't you trivially defeat that by randomizing your IRC username? Blocking email addresses does literally nothing against email spam, why would chat be different?
More of what I was thinking was a killfile controlled by the user, uploaded to the server when updated, that would allow the server to filter messages. You could allow shared blocked lists and support wildcards with whitelist exceptions. In this way, you can block everyone and whitelist who you want, so changing your IRC user name does not help.
In most cases, unless the person connects from somewhere else, specifying a sufficiently wildcarded netmask for the host part also prevents the IRC nick change.
