How To Deal With Internet Bullies?

creyes123 writes "I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I've gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he's mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he changes the subject and bad mouths a different 'flaw.' The cycle repeats a few more times, with no apparent end in sight. I want to encourage folks to share their opinions, but constructive criticism was clearly not his goal. I feel that the whole episode was just a massive time waster for me. What did I do to deserve this? Could I have handled this better?"

Comments

Stop Playing Their Game

[gbulmash]

When you realize you're in a pointless and prolonged exchange with a time waster, bully, etc., get off the ride. "Thanks for your feedback. I'll keep it in mind as I plan future improvements."

- Greg

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[TubeSteak]

When you realize you're in a pointless and prolonged exchange with a time waster, bully, etc., get off the ride. "Thanks for your feedback. I'll keep it in mind as I plan future improvements."

Just because you stop participating doesn't magically cause the troll to lose interest.

If you can give them a non-public outlet to share their critiques, that's great, but generally you pretty much have to ban or otherwise silence the persistent ones.

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my favourite sayings:

"Never mud wrestle with a pig. You get all dirty and the pig likes it."

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[gbulmash]

The whole point of trolling is to get a rise out of people. If you ignore the troll, they lose interest and go find some place where people will argue with them like they want.

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[causality]

The whole point of trolling is to get a rise out of people. If you ignore the troll, they lose interest and go find some place where people will argue with them like they want.

That doesn't mean that everyone else will ignore the troll. You, the site administrator, can decide not to respond. However, if you have X number of users, it only takes a very small fraction of X to keep that troll going, and depending on what kind of forum you have, allowing the troll to persist could be interpreted as apathy or acceptance of what they are doing. So yes, if they are there just to cause trouble then banning them is not unreasonable at all.

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[Opportunist]

So, essentially, what you say is that, if I want to fuck with someone, I just need to register their nick on your forum and let the troll inside of me get creative, and you do all the work for me?

What forum do you run again? A service like this could come handy some time.

Re:Stop Playing Their Game

[CrazyJim1]

Or even better, don't tell them that they're banned. Just let them keep posting, but they're the only ones who sees their posts.

Relax

[Anonymous Coward]

Your best bet is to just relax. Remember, when you argue with an idiot on the internet, two idiots are arguing.

Internet

[bluefoxlucid]

Winning an argument on the Internet is really hard, because people can trump you with their dickhead status or their real status. If you're trying to form a logical argument, they can make something that sounds cool and is easier to register, and people will accept it. Sometimes they just claim the argument is over, after they make a (flawed) point, leaving you unable to counter their blatant insulting of your intelligence (which usually paints you as wrong even if you're arguing over whether or not 2+2 = 7).

It's stupid.

Re:Internet

[TubeSteak]

Winning an argument on the Internet is really hard, because people can trump you with their dickhead status or their real status.

Or as Wikipedia has shown, by their persistence.

Re:Internet

[unlametheweak]

Winning an argument on the Internet is really hard...

Nope, winning an argument on the Internet is easy. Convincing your opponent that you've won is often impossible.

Re:Internet

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If you're trying to form a logical argument, they can make something that sounds cool and is easier to register, and people will accept it.

This is in no way restricted to the internet. It's called Rhetoric, and some people are very, very good at it.

A well practiced Rhetorician can hold firm to their position and outright win any debate no matter what that position is. It's a spectacle as breathtaking as it is devastating. You cannot win, not with your training and experience, i.e. which is probably next to none.

The first mistake is to be calm and reasonable. You have lost at this point. They will berate, accuse and generally inflame the entire discussion until you lose your composure in some small way, at which point they will accuse you of flying off the handle or being unreasonable/oppressive.

The second mistake is expecting them to be logical about things. It's not about logic. It's about sounding like you're in the right. They will spout utter flasehoods and stand firmly by them as long as there is a morsel of plausibility or deniablity. Simultaneously they will select minor problems with your opinion and declare them to be gaping holes or fundamental errors. You're wasting your time trying to point out their lies/errors, as they will easily counterpoint with another one or else move onto a completely new fantasy. All of this puts you on the back foot.

The third mistake and worst mistake is thinking that the purpose of your debate is for one to persuade or win over the other. Never going to happen. You're not going to listen to this polemicist, and they most certainly have no interest in winning over you. The purpose of the debate is to win over the crowd/audience. To win over the undecided, unsure and uneducated.

By engaging fruitlessly in such a debate, by being on the receiving end of one explosive reply after another, you are feeding the crowds doubt about your opinion. Each illogical and emotional reply to you seems ridiculous, but the crowd listens because they generally have no way of telling truths from falsehoods. They see two talking heads, and one of them is fiery indeed, and using language and appealing to emotions they easily understand. What are you going to respond with? Facts!? You're wasting your time, unless your position is a rock hard science, and even then, you could be up against a creationists/crank.

The only way to win, is not to play. Do not feed these trolls. Simply saying "You're arguments are flawed/irrational, and I won't grace them with a response", is vastly more effective than fueling their tirades. The longer you fail to do so, the more impossible it will be to exit the debate without having "lost" (the crowd).

If you absolutely must engage with such a debater, and I counsel strongly against it, then you might benefit from studying logical fallacies, which your opponent is employing in spades. Being able to point out not only his errors, but what type of error it actually is, is a very powerful countermeasure. Just don't rely on it. These guys can be extremely competent, and the best ones have studied most of those already.

You are not trained in Rhetoric, and they are. I repeat, the only way to win, is not to play. Give them no oxygen, because they'll just burn brighter.

TREX them

[Thagg]

What you do is you take their comments, and edit them, to make them say exactly the opposite of what they are saying. So, if they say

Rob Sucks!

You can edit it to say

Rob did a great job.

Or something like that. It's really frustrating for trolls to find that their comments become benign.

Or, just ignore them. That works too!

Finally, what some people do is a little tricky. You ban their IPs, so that nobody *but them* can see their post. They think they are posting some vicious flames, and it shows up when they view the site, but nobody else (not even you, if you want) see it.

ban'em

[maetenloch]

I've been on bulletin boards, mailing list since the 80's and usenet since the 90's, and I've found that the best strategy is to give them a private warning and then ban them if they keep up the bad behavior. Anything else just prolongs the inevitable, wastes your time, and drives away contributing posters.

Quit whining

[HairyCanary]

That thread is really tame. You have an incredibly tiny forum with very few threads, and the first critical comments in a short 12-post thread send you running to Slashdot for help? Wow. Go over and read some forums with a lot more posts and grow a thicker skin. Seriously.

Re:Why not just say ...

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

So, you're telling him to feed the troll? Let the troll know that he's getting to you, and he'll just do it more.

If you run the forum, the best solution is to ban him, and ban him with every new account he makes.

Where's the problem?

[CorporateSuit]

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. The dude's questions don't seem unreasonable, and you keep posting encouraging comments like "this is good stuff" and "these really give me great ideas" so of course he's going to continue providing feedback. He's probably thinking he's doing you a great service and he's the best forum poster in the whole world.

He's more coherent than 90% of the clients I've ever dealt with, and was willing to admit where he was wrong in some points. From my outlook, this man is a model poster and what you should really be encouraging in your community rather than freezing like a deer in headlights. Communities absolutely thrive on the [conceived] ability to alter the outcome of the product that has brought them together. Machiavelli wrote a book on just this type of thing.

If you need him to temper down his comments, simply remind him that you're a small shop and appreciate his patience as much as his input. Tell him that you don't check the board as often as you check your emails, and you would appreciate it if he were to continue this thread via email with you -- like telling someone to bypass your secretary with a direct line, it can be very flattering.

We may be the ones being played

[Magic5Ball]

Clicking through the forums, there appear to be a total of 31 posts in the entirety of the forums (unless registered can see more forums or some such).

It appears that the subject of the thread that is linked to in the story is an unstructured series of bug reports and technical commentary about cases not considered by the software, and suggestions for improvement. The instances where the alleged bully deviates from the topic at hand, the comments regard the forum software in use, and after the first response, the alleged bully withdraws his complaint to return to a discussion about the technical merits of the software.

As a scientist (but not an aviation engineer), the comments, questions, and responses between the allegedly bully and the software author appear to be about technical aspects of the software, and there appears to be a mutual understanding and agreement about issues that got fixed.

The discussion appears to be professional, with the occasional attempt at absurd humour thrown in.

Am I missing something here? Is this story an attempt to generate hits for an otherwise non-notable website for a niche app?

Re:We may be the ones being played

[mikael]

I would agree with what "Magic5Ball" has said. The major contributor to the discussion hasn't critised the website owner personally or used offensive words. The guy does seem to know what he is talking about even if he/she sounds a bit egotistical. I've known people like that before, and usually they don't know that they are being a bit abrasive. If it resorts to name calling then it is bullying.

To the Editors (Timmmay)

[WED Fan]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, editor!!! You actually let this guy use a cheesy, "Please help me with a bully," plea to drive traffic to his site?

What the hell?

Note: I'm not posting anonymous, mod me the fuck down.

He's no troll, you are!

[giminy]

Jeez, I just read your exchange. I can summarize it like this:

Him: "Hey, your software is cool, here's some detailed info on what I think is broken."
You: "Oh, wow, thanks! Okay, let me look at this...okay, I think you're right about this, but wrong about this. Did you click the metric button or something?"
Him: "Thanks for the response. Yeah, I clicked the metric button, which is why you're seeing metric units. Well, I kinda think I'm right about the second thing. Here's why...man, these screen shots were hard to attach and format commentary for, while I'm still writing this, I'd like to add that you should consider using some other software for this forum."
You: "Metric confuses me [ed: who knows why you made a 'Metric' button if Metric confuses you]. Please RTFM. Also, I ignore a bunch of stuff right now but I think it's unimportant."
Him: "Awesome, thanks. By the way, I found this other weird stuff. And I do think this stuff is important, because saying its accurate could actually hurt or kill people. Just sayin'."
You: "Okay. And wow, I didn't look at that other thing. Here's how I fixed it. Thanks! Also RTFM."
Him: "Cool. But I think your fix is wrong because of this disastrous situation that could put a kid's eye..."
You: "You're wrong. **EDIT** Oh, you're right! I'll make that more clear. **TO SLASHDOT** OMG TEH TROLLZz!!11!!"

I mean, the guy wrote a total of five posts (which puzzling make up over 12% of the total posts on your "recently popular" forums), and they all used a lot of "I" messages, none were inflammatory, and they all had a lot of detail about what's wrong with your app (I mean, the guy posted screenshots of your app detailing what he thought was wrong...it's pretty clear that he spent a *long* time writing up what he wrote up).

That he followed up in the same thread with new problems, well, maybe you could say, "let's start a new thread for that new problem." For the most part, the "new problems," were very related to your responses, though.

I think that you need to start taking criticism and suggestions more openly, especially if you're going to operate a forum about your website. And please, please, don't think that I'm a jerk for telling you all of this. I really mean it in the best way. Internet software is cool, and I'm glad to see you writing something fun, so keep on writing the good write, and keep on foruming.

And don't dismiss guys that criticize your software, especially if they use screenshots to do so :).