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"
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
In addition, I am comfortable (although I have not yet done so) to complain to an ISP when a user has been banned and attempts to log in again under a new account. That is, quite clearly, computer trespassing. It is a case of being told "get off *my* system", and somebody repeatedly getting back on.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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.
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.