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."

Comments

Deal with it.

[benjamindees]

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.

Suggestions

[waldoj]

I run a 28,000 person discussion board, so I can relate fully. Were I you, I'd do the following:

1. 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.
2. Require approval of all new users. This will weed out the obvious bullshit accounts - "h8gays" and "queerbait@hotmail.com" and the like.
3. Prevent new users from starting threads for the first 24 hours.
4. 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

Can you report them to their ISP?

[immortal]

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.

From my experience at Napster

[dr ttol]

When I headed the forums at Napster, Inc (the first generation with Shawn Fanning), disruptive users were a constant.

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

Thanks guys.

[Gabe the Programmer]

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.

Suggestions

[haplo21112]

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.