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

Email, then ban by network if they evade it.

[mind21_98]

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.

Active Moderation

[xanderwilson]

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.

Blacklisting?

[tsm_sf]

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

Re:What?

[MustEatYemen]

The logic goes. I have a social issue on a technical system. People at this popular technology site have experience running websites and communities. Maybe they have some suggestion to my problem. On top of this, moderators at slashdot probably had the logic of, this is a intresting issue to deal with on a comunity, and other people who run communties might also want to know how to handle similar situations. If slashdot's moderation systems are working properly, you will probably moderated down as being a troll.

Invite?

[MindStalker]

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.

it's solvable

[boomka]

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.

A simple idea...

[OneDeeTenTee]

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.

Call their ISP

[Guspaz]

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."

Approval system

[jakoz]

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 need to make disruption impossible.

[Eideewt]

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.

reputation systems

[j1m 5n0w]

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

Try using Beehive and Worm (isolate) them

[JimLynch]

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.

Re:Silently isolate them

[JimLynch]

You just described pretty much how Beehive does it. Great forum software. I love the admin controls.