Stopping Disruptive Users in Online Communities? 110
Gabe the Programmer asks: "I'm the lead developer for a website and we have a community there for gay/bi/tran athletes to talk to each other and interact. Well, not surprisingly, because of the sexuality of our members and the site's high profile, we get a bunch of homophobic/racist/hateful trolls who come on to the forum for no other reason than to incite our members and waste their time. Most of the trouble is caused by a cabal of users who hang out on Fightsport.com, and over the past three years they've managed to drag down the atmosphere of our community substantially." If users are going to be rude and disruptive to your community, it might be worthwhile to ban them. Be forewarned, however! This may turn out to be easier said than done, since saavy users can always try and work their way around site bans. If you were a site administrator, how would you deal with intransigent users, and if you were forced to ban them from your site, how would you go about it?
"It's gotten so bad that a lot of our longtime members have left the site altogether, and I personally dread visiting it many days. I know this is something of an age-old problem on the Internet, but what are the best methods to deal with this, both technologically and otherwise? When is it time to contact ISPs? Does that ever work? And what about the law? At what point is it appropriate to pursue legal action? I would really appreciate any advice from other Slashdot readers who are or have been in similar situations with online communities."
Email, then ban by network if they evade it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Email, then ban by network if they evade it. (Score:2)
Re:Email, then ban by network if they evade it. (Score:2)
Re:Email, then ban by network if they evade it. (Score:2)
it's no different than running an open relay mail server.
Use the Slashdot Karma (c) system (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Use the Slashdot Karma (c) system (Score:2, Funny)
reputation systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot does do a remarkably good job of filtering lame content (not by deleting it, but by displaying it less prominently, which is the right approach, in my opinion). The reputation system is a bit of a hack, but it works well. If anyone's interested in what the state of the art is, I came across this www paper [www2004.org] (www [www2004.org] the conference, not www the thing that uses port 80) from some folks at IBM research describing the reputation system used by epinions.com. It gets its input from a mechanism similar to friend and foe lists, and propogates trust and distrust similar to the pagerank [wikipedia.org] algorithm of google.
-jim
Moderate (Score:5, Funny)
This is all theory mind you...
Re:Moderate (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Moderate (Score:2)
Re:Moderate (Score:2)
Implement Slashdot-style scores, karma, and karma-bonus. Just don't make the scores publicly visible. Anything below 1 is hidden unless you're moderating or you've set the preference not to hide; if the former, they're shown first. This way, moderators can counteract abuse of moderation. You can also add bonuses for posts th
What? (Score:4, Funny)
"Let's post our site to *Slashdot*!"
Where did the logic go so awry?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alex.
Re:What? (Score:1)
The result (Score:1)
I liked the $1 [slashdot.org] idea.. seems to be a good way to deter trolls, although seems that on some parts of the world (like Canada), people seem to avoid credit cards.
Re:The result (Score:1)
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe he reads at +5 and thinks we are wonderfull? (Score:3, Funny)
Active Moderation (Score:4, Interesting)
Set up a good number of monitors and/or a way for anyone to report inappropriate messages.
Or have a good number of monitors and make every message require approval by email (moderators receive an email and may approve the message with a click of the mouse) before posting anything. I don't know what the perfect number of moderators is to limit lagtime as much as possible.
Alex.
Re:Active Moderation (Score:1)
You could also require that the messages be of substance too, one message board I am on, limits what you
Deal with it. (Score:3, Informative)
The response of your community can either reinforce whatever prejudices these people already have or work to negate them. It's your decision.
You are more than welcome to maintain private membership of your site, and there are myriad ways to do that. However, it doesn't sound like that's your ultimate goal. Without enforcing strict membership rules, you and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time, or you can simply ban anyone who displays hints of disagreement with whatever the prevailing views of your community are.
It sounds to me like you want it both ways: privacy and publicity. I'm sure there are some DRM companies working on that problem as we speak, but I tend to think they'll ultimately fail.
If you really want to be accepted openly in a free society, you must learn to defend and explain your views/lifestyle/whatever to the less informed. Hang out here for a couple of months and you'll see some good (and bad) examples of what I'm talking about.
Re:Deal with it. (Score:2, Funny)
So are you saying in a perfect world everyone would have a gay uncle?
Re:Deal with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need a gay uncle, a black uncle, an uncle who's an aunt, an uncle of some other religion, a poor uncle, a blind uncle, and so forth, in order to know how to interact appropriately with people who are different.
Re:Deal with it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Deal with it. (Score:2)
Yeah, I know. It just looked nice when I wrote it
Re:Deal with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't reason with trolls. They feed off of *any* attention you give them. Words are fuel to them, no matter what the words say.
You can't appeal to their emotions. Often this is becuase they only see you as a digital abstraction, like an NPC in a game. They do not see a person on the other side.
The only way to deal with trolls is to limit your reaction to reminding others not to respond to trolls. [aol.com]
When you stop responding to them, they will go away. This is a lot easier said than done. The problem is getting *everyone else* to stop responding to them as well. Trolls are great social engineers at manipulating people into responding, and it can be a daunting task to convince everyone to just ignore them.
It's kind of like that Simpsons episode where all the giant anthropomorphic advertisments started destroying the town, and the only way to make them stop was "just don't look".
Not Quite... (Score:1)
Here's what I would do: First, put up an image in your "reply" area/page, warning everyone not to respond to trolls. Second, delete every post that responds to a troll as soon as possible, even if it's just a post warning others not to respond to a troll. As I said, any attention feeds them... and a simple lack of attention will get boring for them, encoura
Re:Deal with it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, to make this work you have to ban anonym
Way too simplified ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have anything other than thinking it works like that to back this up? It's a nice sentiment, but a little naive.
Making a claim like "78% of all intolerant rednecks just haven't learned about you yet"
back in the day... (Score:3, Funny)
ping -f
from a few of the regs used to keep folks in line pretty well
Blacklisting? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Dear ISP, the user assigned to address X engaged in behavior Y on date Z. Transcript/screenshot follows. As a result I have submitted address X to jerkbuster."
Aaand let's not forget that PA was the first to codify this phenomenon: John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [penny-arcade.com]
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:2)
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:2)
Intresting idea. (Score:2)
But spam is easy to define. Exactly how do you define a troll? Just look at /. people often classify someone as a troll just because the person doesn't say what they want to hear or doesn't sugarcoat it enough.
With the ever increasing acce
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:1)
Dynamic IP addresses
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:2)
ban subnet
Ok, so thats a tad harsh, but come on, everyone likes to do it, ban a
Re:Blacklisting? (Score:2)
Catch them earlier with a quiet/grace period. (Score:5, Insightful)
This should mitigate most of the offenders as they won't bother with the hassle--and as long as your forum is active and has good content, those who are really interested will have plenty to do until the grace period is over.
If you need help or more details implementing something like this, send me an email. As someone who works on/develops community sites (plug [nadamucho.com]), solving the issue of keeping out those that you don't want is always tough--especially during the initial growth stages.
Re:Catch them earlier with a quiet/grace period. (Score:2)
By putting in a grace period, you are zapping the enthusiasm of potential postive contributors.
Making it harder for everyone to post not only impacts everyone and it is a bonus for the trolls; there are fewer competing posts.
I've made a comment in another thread on one way to reduce the impact of trolls. [slashdot.org]
In the worst case, you can put
Re:Catch them earlier with a quiet/grace period. (Score:2)
If you want to allow people to post without paying, convince the posters that their visit to the site is somehow being tracked. In the gay-bashing case, I'd take advantage of their naivite and fear. Tell them that they will be associated with yo
Invite? (Score:5, Interesting)
Suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
- Set your
.htaccess to redirect all traffic with a referrer of this white-power site to goatse.cx or something. If they can't post links to ongoing discussions on your site, it will make it very inconvenient for them.
- Require approval of all new users. This will weed out the obvious bullshit accounts - "h8gays" and "queerbait@hotmail.com" and the like.
- Prevent new users from starting threads for the first 24 hours.
- Don't ban trolls. Instead, set all page requests coming from their class of account to have a random sleep time of 30-60 seconds before the page will be delivered, and perhaps 25% of the time yield, simply, a "Server Too Busy" error. This way, they will not create new accounts (as they do if you simply ban them, forcing you to squash a new account), but find the whole affair too much trouble.
All of these are pretty easy to do, and are liable to save you a lot of trouble.-Waldo Jaquith
good tips, mod parent up (Score:1)
Re:Suggestions (Score:1)
Can you report them to their ISP? (Score:3, Informative)
Fascism is cool! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fascism is cool! (Score:1)
Re:Fascism is cool! (Score:1, Insightful)
How exactly is it censorship?
You've used a word in a way that suggests that you don't know what it means.
Stopping harrassment (which is exactly what he's doing) is *NOT* censorship, in any way. The trolls are violating their ISP's AUP, and should be reported.
"I do not like what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
Hey, moron - it's the *ISP* that is doing the banning.
You're just too stupid for wo
Re:Fascism is cool! (Score:2)
Re:Fascism is cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition, I am comfortable (although I have not yet done so) to complain to an ISP when a user has been banned and attempts to log in again under a new account. That is, quite clearly, computer trespassing. It is a case of being told "get off *my* system", and somebody repeatedly getting back on.
--
Evan
Re:Where is the fine line. (Score:1)
Nice going whitey!
From my experience at Napster (Score:5, Informative)
Without moderation, the forums would quickly fill up with junk. It took a full-time staff to moderate the forums to guarentee a certain level of quality.
My specialty is to build communities, and one of the key points is to outline who you want in the community and who you don't want. It seemed obvious that the ones you want are the athletes -- so your boundaries are to exclude all the ones that don't fit your desired community profile. In this case, you have a few options.
1) Dedicate a lot of time to weed out the offensive material/users
2) Let it continue on and hope it will flame itself out
3) Make the community more exclusive (heavier barriers of entry -- more personal information, etc. This would allow users who want to re-register to jump through a lot of hoops each time.)
It seems like #2 was tried, and it seems like you don't have time for #1, so the solution would be #3 with as much #1 as possible.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me. wayne.chang@i2hub.com
Wayne Chang
the i2hub.com munity
CEO
New idea: Default ignore list. (Score:2, Insightful)
This reduces thier visibility without triggering them to generate new accounts.
It would be even better if the disruptive people on the default ignore list did not use the default ignore list when they are viewing the forum. This would hopefully add to the illusion that thier posts were easily visible and further work to avoid
it's solvable (Score:3, Interesting)
Initially a few trusted admins will moderate, then after system has been working for a while everyone with high trust rating will be able to moderate.
System works like this - when you have a new user join the site, their posts won't be submitted immediately, but go into a queue first. Queue is being monitored by moderators who can approve and rate a comment on a scale 1-5 and then it becomes visible to all, and poster's rating grows. When rating reaches 25 (just 5 really useful comment or 25 trashy), user can post and his comments become visible immediately.
If a new user who is known to be "good" joins the site he can be given high rating immedately - implement the sponsorship. High rating users can sponsor new users so that they can post immedately without going to the queue. But if this user is later banned, his sponsor won't be allowed to sponsor anyone anymore.
This system should work well for you. Oh, and obvioysly keep the moderation system in place, a-la Slashdot and the like.
A simple idea... (Score:1, Interesting)
People without a real email address would be required to be sponsered by a current member in good standing who knows them personally either IRL or online.
Alternatively a very polite message to one of the admins explaining why they can't provide a real email address could be considered grounds for admission into the forum.
close off new accounts (Score:2)
This was emploed at gamefaqs on LUE, and things seem to have improved since the lockout. people whine about not getting in, but that's the price of security i guess.
Call their ISP (Score:5, Interesting)
I checked out his IP, turned out to be RoadRunner. A bit of digging around on their sites got me a first-level support line... Called that up and was blunt saying "A user on your network is DoSing my site (It was a DoS of sorts, but I wanted the scare factor as much as anything).
He bumped me a level up, then that guy bumped me a level up, and soon enough, within a few short minutes, I found myself leaving a voicemail with the VP of security (Or similar title, can't remember exactly).
The guy surprisingly enough called me back, and said "I gave the guy a call, told him we were watching him. He won't be giving you trouble anymore."
Re:Call their ISP (Score:2)
What if they're in Russia? or Germany? or you don't know where and can't contact their ISP?
DoS'ing and Trolling seems to come from more countries than just the U.S. last I recall.
Approval system (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll find you get far less problems for your members... since it takes time to earn membership, people won't be inclined to keep trying to get into the private forum, and youll be able to weed the trouble users out.
You need to make disruption impossible. (Score:3, Interesting)
First, you need and atmosphere of respect within the community. When the community members respect each other, two things happen. First, those who consider trolling and flaming won't see a precedent, and will be slightly deterred. I expect at least a few people to be stopped by that hesitation alone. Second, and more important, the community members will not be on edge, as they are in some forums. They simply won't rise to the bait that trolls place, and they won't lower themselves to a flaming level. Since trolls aim to disrupt a community, when they see that they are having no effect on anyone, as they are ignored and their posts are deleted as soon as an administrator knows about them, they'll give up.
To create an atmosphere of respect, you'll have to enforce it strictly, at least at first. You have to disallow any kind of flaming and trolling at all, even from respected community members. You have to delete (or maybe merely edit) posts as warranted by their content, so that you don't have verbal attacks floating around the forum. You don't, of course, have to eliminate arguements, but you do have to force everyone to be civil. Everyone will become civil, because if they don't, their posts will be replaced by something like, "Post deleted by moderator. Please do not make attacks on other forum members." Repeat offenders need to be banned, possibly after being suspended, given a cool down period, and allowed a second chance.
Keeping a community calm starts with the administration, then the community picks up on it, and then newcomers are very reluctant to break that mold.
Re:You need to make disruption impossible. (Score:1)
Verify your users (Score:4, Insightful)
The other option is to hand pick trusted members to act as moderators. Give them the power to completely negate the abusers' posts. Delegate the task down to the actual members and let them help keep their community boards clean. You'll have to hand pick them from the people posting to your boards. Simple moderation probably won't work because you probably won't have enough valid members visit the site quickly enough to get a post modded down to hell. Whereas the abusers (if they earned mod points) would probably band together to get their abusive posts modded up by themselves.
That's what I'd recommend. Verify that a person actually exists, gaining valuable contact information in case the law ever needs to get involved and giving you a way to block the actual person behind the abuse, OR let you members help keep their community boards clean with self-moderation. Either or both would be helpful I'm sure. Best of luck.
Re:Verify your users (Score:2)
Disallow use of HTML (Score:2)
In terms of the hateful words they use, it's important to realize that the Internet is a place where people can be whoever they want--even if they're being someone they're not. So just because people say a bunch of hateful stuff, doe
Re:Something smells fishy... (Score:1)
See my post below. I gave the URL of my website (MMA.tv) in the the original submission but Cliff edited it out. I'm not trying to make Fightsport look bad... It makes itself look bad. The site is run by trolls and the people who post on its forums are by and large also trolls. Go read their forum if you don't believe me: http://www.fightsport.com/fightsport/forum/discuss ion1/forum1.htm [fightsport.com]
keyword checking (Score:2)
But maybe you can help yourselve limit the exposure. Filter each new post on some keywords that are likely to be in a hate post. Also do a regular syntax check. Most hate posts are badly spelled.
Combine this with "trusted" vs "untrusted" members, new accounts and you should be able to determine easily wich posts are highly
Thanks guys. (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for all of the suggestions!
The website by the way, in case any of you are interested, is MMA.tv [www.mma.tv], and the forum is the UnderGround Forum [www.mma.tv].
Re:Thanks guys. (Score:2)
Firstly, you directed the spam trolls away from your site to the attacking site.
Secondly, you sent the interested users to an interstitial ad page.
No Slashdot trolls compounding the problem and maybe some ad revenue on the side. Brilliant.
Re:Thanks guys. (Score:1)
This is used on http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ and it seems to work ok.
Think Like A Publisher: Hire Editors (Score:2)
While you are, in fact, operating a forum that allows people to converse with each other, you are, first and foremost, publishing content on the web. Your primary responsibility is controlling that content. Think like a publisher.
Bayesian filters (Score:1)
Silently isolate them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Silently isolate them (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Silently isolate them (Score:2)
Thanks. I knew somebody a couple years ago who was running a forum and was desperate for something like this. I'll pass it on.
Re:Silently isolate them (Score:2)
Try using Beehive and Worm (isolate) them (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Try using Beehive and Worm (isolate) them (Score:1)
Re:Try using Beehive and Worm (isolate) them (Score:2)
Never ban anyone, never remove a post (Score:4, Insightful)
I ran corporate BBS systems and online forums in the late 80s to early 90s. Before that, I was active in bulletin board systems from the early 80s. In that time, I learned what has served me well on the Internet;
Many people don't understand that they are being asses; the other people are abstractions and not individuals. When you fight them, they take it as an amusing annoyance and are energized to poke you with a stick that much more.
Because of that, you do not want to give them a reason to feel 'wronged';
Never ban anyone.
Never remove a post.
Trust others to figure out the truth by themselves.
The reason why is that you always want everyone to see you as impartial and fair. If you remove or ban something/someone, you are saying that the other view has merit. By not attacking anyone -- even when they are clearly attempting to thwart what you do -- you allow your visitiors to judge.
Keep in mind that the oposite of love isn't hate -- it's apathy . Deal with the trolls apathetically, and they will not feel wanted...you will become booring to them since you offer nothing to attack.
Since you have a focused community, consider granting a moderation priviledge to a select group of frequent visitors. This is not the same as Slashdot since you can pick and choose from the smaller group, and the moderators would only be able to do one thing;
Move the post to another forum.
Once moved, a place marker would be used at the location of the original message or thread with a note saying 'Message moved to the ???? forum' and optionally a link titled 'Click here to view this message/thread'.
If you don't have a catch-all forum, create one to 'dump' the off topic posts. Important:
Do not shove the off topic forum out of view -- keep it in the first block of forums.
Give the new forum a non-insulting even moderately interesting title; 'Rants and raves', 'The lounge', 'Anything goes' or 'Other topics' not "Off topic".
One bonus of this method is that when your regular members do something rude or in bad taste, there is a way to deal with them that you do not control; your visitors control it.
I feel your pain (Score:2)
Everything was going pretty well for a while until the teens started showing up. You can't ban them from the forums because they can just login to AOL, or from School. You can't ban their CD keys or IP from game servers because they would also log into other places or beg mommy to buy them a new copy.
I had one guy sending me 'poems' about
Block the offending subnet (Score:1)
Suggestions (Score:4, Informative)
1. After a new user chooses as username, have the submission form look up against a list of banned words. This kills many trolls immediately because they can't register offending names.
2. Verified registration, the whole Ok we will now send you an email that will contain a URL which will activate your account.
2a. Do not allow any registrations to generic email services. NO hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc accounts are valid for registration. Has to be an account that is at least in theory trackable back to a real person someplace.
3. Install a moderation system similar to slashdot's its one of the few I have seen that works. (For an example of one that doesn't see kuro5hin.org, moderation there is so screwed up the trolls always win)
4. Only allow one registration for your site to a particular email address, cc number, addresses, etc.
5. Require reverification if the user updates their email address.
6. Require periodic reverification of the account.
Re:Suggestions (Score:2)
There are lots of perfectly legitimate users of hotmail et al. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to use a hotmail account, even one under a pseudonym. Consider the subject matter of the forum under discussion, and that not everybody involved might want to be completely public.
...la
Re:Suggestions (Score:2)
Ignore function (Score:2)
Stuff that works for me (Score:2)
I'm having the same issue (Score:1)
I am still digging through options of different Content Managment Systems myself here:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ [cmsmatrix.org]
Let me know if you find a software solution that works for you.