Maybe I'll have better luck asking in this thread
What actually was this event? Was it a speech?
I really think that "more drastic measures" is a backwards way to deal with the problem. If the event was a speech, it was basically just the wrong event in the wrong place.
For most of those people, what's "wrong" with them is that they just want to be involved. But when they can't get involved because the event requires that people sit and watch text spam that they don't understand. The most fun way they see to get involved is following the people who actually seem to be having fun - the humpers.
I've talked to soo many griefers who were just trying to take part, and once they understood how they can do that without pissing people off too much, they did and they had fun. You can't do that with a speech in Borealis, where everyone is passing through. In the simplest sense: you spammed them first.
IMHO...
Spamming people with text they don't care about/understand and expecting them to behave and keep quiet under threat of "getting our Operations Department to talk to the griefers in private" is
not the way to get people involved.
Doing spectator events away from the main crowds and taking events to Borealis where people can actually take part
is the way to get people involved.