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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."
Notice though that the poster didn't give the URL for his or her own site, but for the site that seems to be the cause of the problem. Same result as you suspect; just a little smarter in the planning.
Alex.
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.
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 and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time
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.
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".
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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.
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.
Get off my launchpad!
And especially, require them to metamoderate around 100 posts before giving them mod points, encouraging them to do a lousy job of metamoderating, and make sure the 5 mod points you do give expire in only 3 days, to encourage them to blow them away as fast as possible rather than saving them for flagrant abuse or unusually brilliant postings. Yeah!
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.
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.
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.
Of course, to make this work you have to ban anonymous posting...
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.