As many users on the site have no doubt already noticed, Jeremy has changed the "Troll" button underneath each comment to now read "Hide". So you can press a button under each comment to "recommend" that comment, and if you're a "trusted" user that's been around a while, who makes a decent number of comments, and who ranks in the top tier of "recommended" commenters yourself, you can press the button marked 'Hide' to vote to hide the comment.
We've done this semantic change (one we should have done a while ago, I admit) because it simply makes more sense. The goal of "trollrating" a comment isn't to declare that the user that made the comment is a troll; it's to declare that that particular comment is trollish, i.e. ought to be hidden. Too often, people think that the "Troll" button is conferring trollhood on someone: it's not. It's meant to simply say that a particular comment is over the line as far as being extremely inappropriate, insulting, or disruptive. It is intended to be a service to other readers of the comment threads, and to the diarists, in order to keep the conversations in comments civil and on point.
We've had unending confusion over what "trollrating" a comment means, in the past. Hopefully this simple change should help a bit. Here, I'll copy and fix up the FAQ wording on trollratings -- now "Hide" ratings:
To "Hide" something has exactly one meaning. When you vote to "Hide" something, as a trusted user, you are stating that the comment should be made invisible to all site users. You're saying that the comment is so bad -- so disruptive or damaging to the community -- that it isn't worth even a debate, but should be deleted from the discussion as being simply inflammatory, simply off-topic, or simply a lie.
That's how it's intended to be used. When in doubt, remember: individual bad comments should be "hidden" regardless of whether the commenter is a true "troll" or a perfectly respected user that made a bad comment. You're voting to hide one particular comment, you're not declaring the person who made it to be unworthy of all future discourse. And never -- NEVER -- vote to hide a comment just because the commenter disagrees with you, so long as that comment is civil.
There are other conventions that the community has adopted, such as negatively rating a diarist's "tip jar" to indicate that they think the whole diary needs to be deleted, and negatively rating many, many comments of a given commenter if it's been very (and I do mean very -- be careful with this one) clear that they're a true troll simply looking to disrupt the community. Those exceptions are rare.
The mechanism of how this all works remains exactly the same. It takes two 'Hide' votes to hide a comment from most site users and perusers, and a single 'Recommend' vote offsets four 'Hide' votes, enabling comments to be rescued if they really didn't deserve to be hidden. Think carefully before "rescuing" a comment, as you're putting your judgment against that of multiple other site users. 'Recommending' a truly hide-worthy comment is likely to get your ratings abilities removed.
Autoban continues to remain the same as well: get too many of your comments hidden in a short period, and your account will be automatically deactivated, preventing you from posting any more diaries or comments. If you are autobanned (or manually banned by an admin), that's it -- you can ask for reinstatement by emailing 'reinstatement' at dailykos.com, but in 99% of the cases it's permanent. If you come back using another name, you will be banned again, regardless of your behavior.
One related point: we've been continuing to remove ratings from posters who either trollrate -- sorry, "vote to hide" -- comments that are clearly not deserving of being hidden, or who give 'recommend' ratings to bitter fights between users that disrupt the comment threads. These ratings removals are going to be temporary: in 99% of these cases, we're planning on restoring the ratings as soon as the primary season fights are over. It's just a way to temporarily prevent each side from "ganging up" on each other quite so viciously. And yes, the ratings removals are of necessity somewhat arbitrary; we can't catch everyone, and we do catch people who are undeserving. Remember, it's only temporary.
The community is supposed to do this moderation themselves, by hiding off-topic fights that become disruptive to individual diaries so that the rest of the community doesn't have to look at that nonsense, but during primary season people have taken to uprating people on their own side for clearly inflammatory things, and trollrating people for things no worse than they themselves frequently say. Hence the temporary ratings pulls, in order to try to limit the amount of impact that those ratings fights have.