Or maybe I don't understand what exactly you mean by "moderation tools". You said it can't be just the ability to ban a specific person, so what could it be?
What comes to my mind is something like:
- allow friends-of-friends of maintainers to send issues/patches/etc;
- if you're not in the friend-of-friend whitelist you have to pass some arbitrary criteria like, I don't know, paying some satoshis, burning your CPU a little, passing a captcha or doing a phone KYC with some trusted server (all bad solutions, but what can I do);
- allow blocking specific people that pass the criteria above.
What comes to my mind is something like:
- allow friends-of-friends of maintainers to send issues/patches/etc;
- if you're not in the friend-of-friend whitelist you have to pass some arbitrary criteria like, I don't know, paying some satoshis, burning your CPU a little, passing a captcha or doing a phone KYC with some trusted server (all bad solutions, but what can I do);
- allow blocking specific people that pass the criteria above.