Slashdot Mirror
Stopping Disruptive Users in Online Communities?
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."
I would email them personally and explain why exactly they're being banned. Once this is done I'd remove their account from the database. If they register another, that's when I begin to ban by network. At least that's what I'd do for Know Your College. Luckily, we have not had any problems requiring a ban yet considering the community is small.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
It got rid of the trolls here...
I'd setup a moderation system. Every so often I'd give random users 5 points they could use to moderate posts. Of course you would need a meta-moderations to watch the moderators as well..
This is all theory mind you...
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
"We have a problem with trolls saying nasty things on our site."
"Let's post our site to *Slashdot*!"
Where did the logic go so awry?
May we never see th
When you say "forum," I'm picturing a bulletin board system of some type, not a chat room.
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.
In their own way, these 'disruptive trolls' you mention are really just learning about your lifestyle and what kind of people you are. They are 'testing the boundaries', so to speak. Not everyone grows up with a gay uncle to learn sufficient tolerance and/or respect for cultures different from theirs.
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
the ol' ;)
ping -f
from a few of the regs used to keep folks in line pretty well
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
I'm wondering how well an IP based blacklist for jerks would work. I'm assuming that an ISP or internet cafe would want to get rid of a customer that poisons any IP address they touch.
"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
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
When a user registers, give them read-only access to the forums for a few days or more--possibly with the option for access immediately if they make a donation ($1?).
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), solving the issue of keeping out those that you don't want is always tough--especially during the initial growth stages.
How bout an invite system like gmail or something. You should personally invite all the known old users back. Encourage them to invite online friends, obviously the troublemakers could scam their way into it. But think of it as a social network I guess.
- 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
Since you know their IP and can track down their ISP, if their language and post were severe, then maybe you can report them for hate crimes to their ISP? It would certainly get the ISP's attention and maybe get their account canceled.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
yes i think goatse.cx would work particularly well on a gay-hater. only wish i had a webcam to capture said troll's face :) just a shame the site's down at the moment (allegedly, i'm not checking!). seriously though, i can't recommend pointing people to obscene material, your other tips are good though. i'd make it longer than 24 hours, a week even.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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
Set up a default ignore list for all users. Anyone on the list isn't banned, they can still post, but thier posts have to be specifically selected by the users in order to be read.
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 triggering them to start a new account.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
You will need rating system with moderators;
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.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
Require that new account registrations provide a real ISP provided email address, IE not a free account.
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.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
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.
SAILING MISHAP
Surprisingly enough, this works. I had a user who was performing thousands of searches to bump phrases up into the top-ten-searches list.
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."
Have a public forum which appeard to be the main forum. Then have the real main forum as an invites only/approval members area, where approved members can talk happily, having already proven themselves. Youll find the public one will become a bit of a cesspool, but it won't bother your members because they'll have a place to talk happily.
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 can't make attempts to disrupt the community impossible, but you can certainly make it impossible to actually disrupt the community. If everyone ignores trolls and flamers in every way except notifying an admin, and possibly a polite request for them to stop, there's no reason to troll. The whole point is to get a rise out of people.
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.
Do you honestly feel that it's ever acceptable to censor someone in that manner? Why stop there, why not send abuse complaints every time someone flames you on a newsgroup? Or every time someone expresses an opinion you don't agree with? Banning them from YOUR website/forum is one thing, and is your prerogative. Trying to get people's accounts terminated at their ISP is another entirely. Repeat after me: "I do not like what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
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.
That way the threat of a ban actually means something. Also, every dipshit that wants to waste $5 to make an account just to spam some bullshit makes you few bucks.
Maybe he reads at +5 and thinks we are wonderfull? Often misguided and clueless but wonderfull nonetheless?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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 access to the internet this is going to be a bigger and bigger trouble. I seen several sites close down because some asshole went about disrupting it. Slashdot was early enough and grew big enough to be able to withstand the assaults but many smaller sites just can't cope.
Sadly this would suggest that the invention of a "trusted" net is unavoidable. Not just for companies and their business sites but for the sake of all the amateur sites as well.
Remove the anonimity and many trolls will be forced to behave by their own nature. The simple fact that they are all cowards. Troll courage runs fast when they think they been found out.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've been a message board admin for 3 years and one of the worst things that can happen on a message board is HTML posting. HTML can be used maliciously. That by far outweighs any words that a troll could use. And believe you me, there are people that would go to that length.
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, doesn't mean that they can own up to the words they use. The Internet allows people to build their egos to ridiculous levels.
http://www.fightsport.com/ (mentioned in the story) is a Mixed Martial Arts website.
Gabe the Programmer's E-Mail Address is gabe@mma.tv
mma.tv is another Mixed Martial Arts website. It almost appears that they are trying to make fightsport look bad, although this is from just basic observations.
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 suspect and wich don't have to be moderated at all.
A new member from a dialup referred from an other site and a first post with even 1 keyword wrong would only become visible after being moderated. With say a dozen keywords it would simply get dropped.
Maintaining an online communtity is going to become harder and harder. Either you create a secure site or you are going to have to deal with the AOL people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's not enough to simply post a reply to a troll to ignore them. Indeed, this feeds their desire to continue. The fact is, any attention feeds a troll.
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, encouraging them to leave (or start behaving themselves).
~UP
Eat the Path.
like for example http://thechaosengine.com/ where videogame developers meet in private after http://www.fatbabies.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=1 became nothing but a forum for trolls...
Thanks for all of the suggestions!
The website by the way, in case any of you are interested, is MMA.tv, and the forum is the UnderGround Forum.
So what would happen? Will you update us by writing a journal?
I liked the $1 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.
hemi
Don't worry, there's goat.cx.
The best way to control your content is to use real live human editors. Technical tricks will not eliminate all the offensive content.
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Simply deny all anonymous proxy usage and also log everyones IP..
There are websites out there that already offer anonymous proxy detection.
I wonder if anyone tried to implement bayesian filters to detect trolls. Works pretty well for spam... Of couse there must be some moderators to initially feed the database and correct false positives/negatives, but afterwards it should work mostly autonomous.
:w!q
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 (www 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 algorithm of google.
-jim
Modify the software so that you "isolate" a user rather than ban them. By which I mean an isolated user would see his own posts, but no other user would. So the creeps wouldn't know right away that they'd been shut out, and would just think they were being ignored. And other users wouldn't have to deal with them. Maybe even make it so that isolated users see posts from all other isolated users, so that the sick abusive group members could brag to each other about their posts, not realizing that they're shouting into a vacuum.
The Beehive forum software has a terrific admin control called "worm" that lets you quietly isolate problem users. They don't know that the only people that see their messages are your admins. Everybody else sees their messages as deleted. You can download Beehive here. You can also check it out on my message board too.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
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.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Whats the difference between free speech and hate crimes? When it incites violence. What is your definition of a hate crime? If you don't have one then you defend the KKK right to tell people to drag, hang, and murder black people.
Nice going whitey!
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
Well, I'm ssuper, thankss for assking! ;-)
Back in the day of I had a popular gaming site with a large online community of players. We had forums, lots of game servers, lots of events, LAN parties, good times.
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 the different ways he was going to kill me because I was deleting his off topic and 1 liner posts from the forums. I'm sure you know the type. Post count is everything to these morons.
What began as a like 20 or so hard core gamers (all over 21) turned into about 500 obnoxious kids. All the people who helped originally found the community left in frustration and in the end, it was me alone. I felt like some kind of baby sitter. I ended up shutting down the site which was the best thing I ever did.
Got a dog, and wife, better job, lost some weight, started a new business, and pretty much left the gaming world behind.
IP addresses may change due to not having a fixed IP available through providers, but usually subnets do not change. Instead of just blocking the offending IP of (example), 207.235.192.190, just block the subnet of 207.235.192.*. Your problems will be cut in half. On top of a subnet block, you can also block usernames, as well as entire netblocks if needed. You may effect innocent individuals, but it will be the most effective. Note that if you decide to block off netblocks, you will greatly impact the accesablity for your site, and may get accused of running a site like a facist dictator.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
I have been through this ordeal as well here are my suggestions.
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.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Add a function so that each user can decide who to ignore. If the trolls don't get enough attention, they should leave after a while.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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" sounds like, well, it might have emanated from your ass.
There are always going to be those people who given the opportunities to learn about these things will just go back to their built in bigotry and not care. There will be people who just categorically won't ever change their mind. And there may even be those who used to side with you but have become majorly intolerant people as time has gone on.
Lots of people will simply remain ignorant idiots throughout their life and feel no need to change in any way. You can't always even get the horse to water, let alone expect it to drink. And those who make a point of being 'disruptive trolls' aren't likely to come around to your way of thinking.
In this case, it sounds much more like an example of people who deliberately have gone to the site to be disruptive, NOT a bunch of people who haven't had the chance to learn about the issue and, after, just really need a hug to become nicer people.
The problem with the internet, is just as you're free to put up your views, the infantile are also free to abuse your forum unless you can keep them out.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Dang King George and his infernal taxes! And his mercenaries, hessians, scum! We should rise up against them and free ourselves from their clutches! To arms! Hang 'em!
Seems like way back when a lot of guys would have been guilty of hate speech and inciting to violence..... hmm,. they were according to the King.....
slippery slope... careful what you wish for....
I use captchas, a 48 hour cooling off period for new accounts (they can read, but not post), and no anonymous posting. These take care of 90% of the spam and trolls. I was concerned about turning off anonymous posting at first, but the benefits really outweigh the costs.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Bingo! Exactly!
Set EVERY user in your forum to ignore the hateful users. This way, they think that everyone is ignoring them and they go away!
I run a flat BB system too. Right now I am looking for software that includes a Karma type Friend/Foe filtering solution. SCOOP has been considered by it's more of a news/slashcode type system.
I am still digging through options of different Content Managment Systems myself here:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Let me know if you find a software solution that works for you.
Well congrats to the Fightsport trolls for sucking in the Slashdot crowd. Good responses though, maybe the real site admins can institute some of those policies to get those losers out of the system.