Slashdot Mirror
Getting Rid of Trolls In WordPress
CypherXero writes "I recently had to deal with a bunch of unwelcomed trolls to my blog, and it became my number one priority to stop it before it got out of hand. Luckily for me, I'm using WordPress, so I had a lot of great options for stopping trolls."
I believe I have written a little about trolls here but, blogs are the unfortunately the best place to troll. Places like slashdot get their fair share but the "many eyes" benefits quickly put them into obscurity. Though when one latches onto your site with only a handful of readers, it can be very hard to persuade them to move elsewhere.
Trolls are often very smart and if they see active counter measures like IP-banning and "disemvoweling" they are likely to find one of the many ways around those countermeasures because they know they're annoying someone.
The best thing I can think of is to have a slashdot-like mechanism where you're the only mod and everybody starts at -1 (only the subject of their reply visible). You check in a couple times a day and "promote" comments so that the entire body is seen. But that rather draconian.
Hmm... like spam there's no clear way to stop trolls, only minimize the pleasure they get from trolling. If you have a clear and consistant plan before the trolls hit, I'm guessing you'll be better prepared. And yes, you've seen it here, the best advice is "Don't feed the trolls".
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
The only thing wrong with modding trolls down automatically is that they'll just create a new account without that restriction. Then you'll drive trolls do just do one troll per account.
Like I said active counter measures don't do very well when the whole point of being a troll is getting attention. The whitelist thing is good, but many blog sites have a lot of one or few time posters. When you're running a blog you're not really trying to create a community (where the whitelist would work well) but rather trying and get people to respond to your thoughts. It might end up as a community but you have to tread very carefully before making first time posters less visiable.
One thing I *have* seen work well was to have first or few time posters not have any rich abilities, ie. you can't link or bold or have a small font or whatever. That way you'd have to work a little bit to become a really *visible* troll and that's often more work than most trolls want to do.
Also, I want anonymous posters. Often, the whole registration thing is too much work when I just want to make one comment (and probably never go there again.) Maybe sprinkle some Wiki ideas in whatever anti-trolls measurs you take.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Something Awful forums do this, and it's nicknamed a "hellban". There have been folks who have gone weeks without realizing they were even banned, as they merrily, and gradually less merrily, posted away.