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."
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-
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.
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
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
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."
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!
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.