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."
How does this constitute a story?
So some guy figured out how to work WordPress webapp. Good for him. How is this news for nerds, or stuff that matters?
I really don't care if some guy has managed to set up his site correctly. Good for him, but why waste our time with this?
I will probably be modded as a troll, but someone has to go and say this. Slashdot has been slipping. There is so much good content out there, why do we have to read about this shite?
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?
I'm SURE you'll find the answer here.
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?
Full text of what I got:
Dealing With Trolls in WordPress
You are not authorized to access this page.
Whatever he did works great, I didn't even get a chance to troll before I was denied access.
-G
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".
One creative solution I heard from Phil Greenspun is to simply let the trolls post away. If you find someone is trolling, simply mark their account (or IP address) with a troll flag in the database. With this flag, they can post all they want but they are the only ones who can see the content -- to everybody else, what they post doesn't even show up. This way, the trolls think that their stuff is visible but nobody ever replies or makes any comments, which makes for a very dissatisfying troll experience. Trolls want nothing more than to get attention and stir up a controversial discussion, or have adversarial matches where they try and defeat your banning methods. Hard drive space is cheap, and it's rather easy to filter results based on account information so that only certain people see it. I think it's one of the better ways to 'not feed the trolls'.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Someone mentioned that Something Awful does this. Fark does it too. It sounds great, but the problem is that it creates great distrust in your userbase. I've seen people shadowbanned for years who made a comment or two some moderator thought was offensive. By not knowing if you are shadow banned or not, it creates a sense of paranoia.
My best solution in a blog like setting is to set up a simple yay or nay filter. If something is obviously spam or nothing but vitriol, then flag it. The default view settings for the reply threads will be not to show flagged messages, but you should provide a link for the user at large to see the flagged messages should he desire to.
Yes, the trolls will know that they are having an effect. However, that is life. Anybody can be a jackass and get a reaction. I say let him be a jackass. If he wants to continue posting vitriol I can just keep flagging it.
Of course, if it gets to the point of crapflooding or denial of service, then IP bans will be in order. But if it's just a few messages every day, well, that's just the price of running a blog or forum that values trust, openness, and transparency.
Do the hellban, and have automatic ( Liza, anyone ) reply mechanism in place for when they post. Then they will not be as able to tell from the lack of replies.
AND, you could even reverse troll them with the replies!
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