I think the L5 forum should be split in sub forums or categories, which allow separate subscription and monitoring, for
a) technical discussions/issues and
b) other things like refund policies, questions of being Purism insolvent, prices and other such rant.
Your topic should probably be in the Site Feedback category. 
There would be many forum moderation / forum organisation approaches.
I would say:
“uninformed speculation about Purism’s being insolvent” ⇒ sin bin / ban user
Issues that are really unresolved Purism support issues (leading to rant) ⇒ separate category for unresolved Purism support issues
If no other change is made ⇒ move all dross to Round Table.
Well, well. I also think it’s a bit late for this proposal, unless the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train.
While unfortunately the shipping delay is still around 4 years, we have reason to believe this is resolved in the coming months, as the remaining orders should be significantly fewer.
I’d also hope they fix their refund issues. Consequently, the bankruptcy speculations would also fade.
In the mean time, you can mute any annoying topic (and thus hide it from the timeline).
Only retrospectively.
If it’s going to turn into a 100-reply flamefest then there is some merit in muting it. Otherwise, it is in my timeline whether I like it or not before I get a chance to mute it.
… and hopefully if shipping delay shrunk all the way down to 10 business days, there wouldn’t be many refund requests at all. 4 years is a big window of time for a “change of mind” (change of circumstances).
The original poster is just trying to censor and limit what can be said in these forums. Perhaps we should create a fourth category just for his posts only, something that is especially easy for all users to block, without even needing to read the subject line first. Better yet, put a subscription charge on that one only. Why? Because I don’t like nor agree with what he says and consider his words to be a rant.
If Purism deserves criticism, I am going to offer criticism. Sorry. But you just have to deal with it or go elsewhere. Maybe some innocent person will be warned by what I say, and will thus, not unknowingly choose to sign up for a four-year wait to get their product. I recently posted positive recognition for Purism’s recent shipping of many Librem 5’s. It goes both ways.
If you want to control what can be said on an internet platform, you can always go to Meta platforms. No need to foster cults and create social credit systems here. You can’t please everyone no matter what you do. Some people such as guru will always feel offended.
I fail to see how that is a reasonable characterisation of what the OP wrote.
The OP just doesn’t want to have to see rants (and in that I am somewhat sympathetic to his thoughts). That is certainly not limiting what can be said and is not censoring in the usual sense of the word. It is not stopping anyone from ranting. It is saving other users from having the rants getting in the way of what they are trying to achieve.
The OP is not even proposing “shadow banning”, where a rant would be ranked so lowly that it would be missed by most people. (I think this forum software just orders by date/time of last activity. That has the perverse effect that a provocative rant is permanently promoted ahead of other content i.e. the opposite of shadow banning.)
The original post is just saying: let’s have a category for rants and a category for positive problem solving. The ranters can get it out of their system and the rest of us can get on with solving problems.
If you want to criticise anyone for censorship then criticise me because I did actually say “sin bin / ban user” - hence censorship in the usual sense of the word. (However I only intended to apply that to posts with legal consequences. So, digressing somewhat, if you expect to be allowed to make defamatory posts then you are going to be disappointed. To be clear, I am not suggesting that you have made defamatory posts, just pointing out the limits to free speech, by way of an example.)
I think we would both be rather cynical about social credit in a wider (societal) context but in a personal context it is still a useful tool. If a user nearly always posts rants that offend me then I see nothing wrong with marking that user in my login as a “byte thief” and no longer seeing that user’s posts. Somewhere between those extremes is the end of usefulness for social credit. That does not of course mean that particular forum software necessarily provides the desired functionality or does what I want.
Social credit or no social credit, you can get binned for ad hominem attacks and I think your last sentence walks the line.
In the late 1990’s years, USENET and its groups have been what nowadays are browser managed forums. The clients to read them mostly have been alphanumeric, terminal based clients. Archives of the thousands of different newsgroups can be found for example here: https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ua_old.htm
The news clients (I was used to use nn) had a nice feature: so called private killfile, an ASCII file where you put line by line mail addrs of people their articles you didn’t wanted to see/read anymore. I don’t know if this could be implemented here in this forum as well.
Since you asked, I looked into it.
Discourse does have that functionality.
Click on the offending user, go to the user’s profile. You will see “Normal”. Clicking it brings up other options as follows:
Whether you should do this is contentious. For example, it can create “consensus bubbles” (to quote one online discussion that I saw) or “echo chambers” (as I would more normally say).
However this isn’t entirely what I personally was seeking. I was seeking a better organised forum, where rants go in the rant category. So I could still see other posts by the offending user. So I could even go and read a rant if I wanted to.
@irvinewade, thanks for your hints about muting offending users. I will think about it, even if I have to say, that the above cited about that I try to censor someone is a heavy and false accusation.