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."
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.
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".
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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!