The suggestion is to give moderators a means to block troublemakers from posting additional comments on a thread where they are misbehaving. They can post in other threads, but not the one they're blocked out of. People that want to kill a thread can get nastier to spur comments in kind that kill the thread--which seems to have happened here.

All moderators need is a link at the bottom of a post (where it says [quote] [print] [save]) for [block]. Maybe there needs to be a check box to indicate why the block is occurring for bad behavior or off-topic. I don't think a reason is needed. Most people will figure out why they got blocked from a thread.

Otherwise, you're letting the people with the least appropriate behavior dictate what topics are allowed to be discussed. The negative comments came in a lot hotter and heavier after the moderator threatened to close the thread. I'd suspect that's fairly typical.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon