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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?"
I'd try to set up the forum so he is the only one who can see his posts so he thinks his messages are getting through and everybody else is ignoring him.
Nah, he will probably come back using proxy's.
Instead use some scripting to make his posts invisible to everybody, but himself (only someone visiting from his IP gets to see his posts/comments). He will think he is successfully posting his trolls, but nobody else sees them.
The problem with a 3 strikes rule, is that it does not differentiate between 3 strikes in 2 days and 3 strikes in 50 years.
Take a guess as to how often you can allow someone to lose it. I would guess once a year is probably a place to start. So, we might then say that assigning a "half-life" to the incident of 6 months would be fair. Any time an incident happens, we start keeping track of this exponentially decaying strike. If we had 1 strike at day 0, one at 6 months, and one at 1 year; the first strike has decayed to 1/4 and the second to 1/2. So the "score" at the time of the third strike is 1.75. Another strike at 1.5 years would see the total: 0.125+0.25+0.5+1. At this rate, it would take a long time to attain a score of 3. If this works with your group, keep it. If people are getting out of line too much, obviously the half life is too short.
If you're the moderator, just shadowban their account.
They can post, but nobody sees their posts except for the bully.
Eventually they leave, since they think that everyone is ignoring them.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Also, according to the roster, the majority of the new (pre-slashdot) non-posting users appear to be registered in a pattern consistent with automatic account generation using approximately 2.5 username formats, with no indications of the standard network effects that would show up if people registered and attracted their friends to this resource. I would guess that there are fewer than 10 accounts tied to humans in total (given profile content and posting history), and that BlackHawk0's "bullying" contributes the highest volume and quality of content in the forums other than the administrator.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Believe it or not, I RTFA'd for once. The "bully" seems pretty confused and uses some slightly abrasive turns of phrase, but he seems genuinely interested in helping improve the tool. He doesn't constantly "change the subject and bad mouths a different 'flaw.'"... he seems to stay right on target with his list of 8 things he perceives as problems. Also, some of those things really WERE flaws, like the RPM warning bug you described. Lastly, he hasn't posted in a week... he probably thinks YOU'RE the bully because (from his perspective) you keep rejecting his suggestions.
Anyway, it doesn't matter now, because the Slashdot effect has taken hold.
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.
It works in any situation. The promise that "we just don't have it yet but we will soon!" is a major rhetoric (bullshit) point. Two examples come to mind.
Stem cell research (political shit): adult stem cell treatments are stable, simple, and easy; they don't get rejected by your body and tend to involve just triggering a simple cellular reaction from bone marrow stem cells (see chemotherapy, which uses this to rebuild your bone marrow; but they work for muscle and nerve tissue too, among other things). Embryonic stem cell treatments have not surfaced yet, but some experiments have worked in extremely sensitive, constant chemical controlled environments to grow minor samples of tissue; if it does work, you need anti-rejection drugs to suppress your immune system.
Despite massive advances and promise, and even adult stem cell procedures that regrow whole organs (teeth in particular, from enamel to dentine to nerves and blood vessels), people swear that not only is embryonic stem cell research potentially beneficial, but that it will cure all diseases. The major claims include things like regrowing whole arms or organs, and no mention of rejection drugs and immune system suppression. Adult stem cell research is totally discarded in such discussions, or laughed at as having no potential for even the most trivial treatments.
Audio processing: Vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes are great. They have good frequency response, good linearity in their range, can be NFB'd and UL'd to have ultra-linear operation, can warm a signal with second-order harmonic distortion (actually good for listening, but not really hi-fi), and can operate in frequency and power ranges that solid state devices can't (magnetron, high power broadcast towers, etc). In guitar amps, tubes produce a pleasant form of distortion, both warming the signal and (driven harder) dirtying it in extremely complex and difficult to simulate ways.
Audiophiles are nuts and believe only tubes truly reproduce sound correctly. In extremely low frequencies this is true. In the general audio range above some 100Hz, a good JFET and MOSFET circuit will produce much better results; of course, the frequency response isn't as flat, and needs a little filtering (what do you think equalizers are for?). A good tube preamp into solid state power amp actually does sound nice, linear or slightly distorted (i.e. ONLY second order harmonics).
On the other hand, some "practical" folks think tubes are obsolete. They cite DSPs for simulating tube distortion. It's extremely complex and nobody's done this, but that's apparently just because nobody's tried. Never mind that actual signal analysis isn't perfect and doesn't react like any real electronic circuit. They always discard that even a simple filter circuit implemented in DSP sounds pretty bad compared to a Baxandall tone stack with resistors and capacitors. Tubes are old, therefor obsolete, and digital signal processing can do anything perfectly; nobody's yet bothered to implement it, ever, but it's trivial.
All arguments go this way. Even when nobody in the world really knows the answer, you can see the bullshit in the air.
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The main reason to ignore the troll isn't about getting them to go away, but more about clogging up the forum and getting troll posts or topics to stay at the top.
A forum I frequent had one of those posters that would invariably attract a lot of negative attention. I'm not so sure that it was intentional trolling, but when he'd post there would typically be seven or eight posts criticizing previous topics and a number of posts criticizing the criticism.
Had people ignored the post, there was in fact a built in feature which would automatically do so, there would just be 1 post. But because people weren't ignoring it there would now be in excess of 10 posts dealing with it. Needless to say that sort of thing really adds up quickly in terms of noise.
In my experience banning the troll only agitates it.
I was thinking, why not give them their own little sandbox, where only users marked as 'troll' could see posts by other trolls?
What?
And that's why /. has the moderation system.
Allowing moderation from other users may help the problem.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They can pick up on a shadowban by checking posts while not logged in (if they get suspicious). Then guaranteed they start a new registered user account.
In the past I've dealt with trolls by doing a mod on the forum code. Once tagged as "troll", all threads just seem to end with their comment. Nothing more is shown in the thread following their rant except for their further rants when they look. Everyone else sees the normal thread. Just one strategy that helped out a few times.
You could feed them a little. Just a few replies here and there, and at a minimum it'll take them longer to get the idea.
Hi!
Anonymous Coward here (I should sign-up). Anyway I think that is a really good point. youtube does that with it's moderated comments. The comments appear to have been posted to the user who posted them, but don't show up to anyone else until the channel mod accepts them. Strikes me as a rather clever way to deal with trolling.
~AC
First, use a secondary ID to link accounts together. If there is no secondary ID, one is generated and sent as a cookie. If the user logs in as any other user that user gets the ID set by the cookie, thus the two (or more) accounts are linked. All IP addresses that so much as view anonymously with this ID are linked to the ID and thus to the accounts.
Now shadowban all the accounts, IP addresses, and the secondary ID itself.
If they log in as another account that is already linked, they will see the post.
If they visit from an IP address that is already linked, they will see the post.
If they visit with a browser which contains a cookie with the secondary ID, they will see the post.
This is not perfect and there are ways around it, but most trolls won't figure it out and even if they do a single mistake links their accounts/IP addresses forever.
This is how the conversation petered out:
In any case, the warnings are a minor problem compared to the invalid airfoil data. I hope that you manage to get it all straight though. The software might be impossible to 'fine tune' properly (but I simply have no idea about it), but a lot of real-world data is available in various books and publications, so it hopefully shouldn't be a major issue.
Seriously, that's an Internet bully? Sorry, but you need to grow slightly thicker skin if you want to interact with people. I mean ANY people, not just on the net. Yes, he came across as a bit of a know-it-all, and pointed out some perceived flaws in something you've obviously spent a lot of time on and care about. It's always hard to hear one's work criticized, but try not to take it personally. The guy seriously didn't strike me as the type that's going out of his way to offend you. Try not to take it in this light.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of an insult to him to describe him as a bully. Over-bearing, maybe, but certainly not a bully.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's fucking weird and beyond me, a British friend, after driving me to the point of rage in a face-to-face conversation, abruptly apologized and explained that every time his family gets together for Christmas or Boxing Day or whatever, they have these artificial, screaming arguments with each other, over any topic they come up with, be it India's economic situation or France's space program. Sort of an advanced, free-for-all, last-man-standing-wins version of Python's Argument Clinic. And they fucking enjoy it. Then it hit me: I've never been able to transmit a concept to this guy without him disrupting with some irrelevant and confusing interjection.
Anyway, it sounds more like Being Hit In The Head Lessons to me. Or like you say, plain old Flinging Douchebaggery. Mind Games. Making Noise. Pushing Buttons.
Recently, something truly weird and abrasive happened. A friend who manages an upscale bistro with a cool bar, was there having beers with some more friends, when a common acquaintance showed up with bizarre company: A cigar smoking, up-and-coming American arms dealer. This young republican asshole had the nerve to declare that his government is beyond reproach, while every other government is corrupt.
Holy cow, now that's a Flamebait situation if I ever saw one. But the guy was not playing Mind Games, he was being serious. Needless to say, the whole thing turned into a prolonged, very nasty screaming match at point-blank range.
Later, my friends said I should have been there that night, to help verbally and logically kick the guy's ass, but I thought "why bother"? I wouldn't have changed his mind, already damaged goods, I don't need to pointlessly overload my nervous system and ruin a perfectly fine evening... again.
Be it cynical Mind Games or willful ignorance, cupping hands over ears while screaming "Mary had a little lamb", some people are simply beyond the reach of rational discourse, a lesson that cost me a lot of pain to understand.
Case in point, my mother "refuses to believe that she comes from a monkey". Ironically, she always brought the subject up, yet to her, I'm the Troll, she suffers because "I'm going to hell", and often attempted to guilt-trip me about it (it's all about her, you see). After learning to let go of that emotional muck, everything else seems like a milk run now.
Wow, that was a long rant, sorry.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Best punishment in forum: Girlie Ban. Everyone gets to edit banned user's posts. Hell forum features this (along with the visual torture that is its color sceme).
I think that will lead to.. well let's call it craziness, once they figure it out.
Other than slashdot, I think the best mod system is multi leveled.. for example...
Warned..... Shows up with their avatar.. A blight on your good name until removed
Moderated.. Also shows up, but all posts approved by administrator before posting (extra work)
Muted...... Can read but not post.. A time out if you will.. for several days
Banned..... Permanent Solution.
Of course with all these some warning is given.. and you should have a Terms of Service (forum rules) that back up what you think is and isn't appropriate behavior... with this system, you start at the top.. and work your way down until banning. If it's a place the poster wants to use, then it will rarely get past the warned or moderated stage... all but "Banned" are meant to be temporary.. just slight attitude adjusters.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I kind of agree with this guy, and can't help but feel if he hadn't worded his argument as harshly as he did, he wouldn't have been modded troll.
Or maybe whoever modded him troll felt like he was attacking them personally, and the comments hitting so close to home made them mod him down. Whatever. I would've called it interesting, if nothing else. Even in the geek community there's geeks who embrace their geek status but are still embarrassed by other geeks and their ridiculous behavior.
I realize I risk getting modded down for supporting an angry AC, but I don't post AC myself, and I'm kind of proud of that, in a geeky sort of way.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
And how do you prevent the troll from getting a sockpuppet account to check whether other persons can see their posts?
A combination of fight club rules and ip-blocking - any account coming from the same IP address as the 'muted' account for X hours afterwards can see the muted posts and/or is also muted while they are on the same IP. You could end up trolling the troll so badly that he creates an entire thread of flames between sockpuppet accounts that no one else will even see.
Or maybe you could just make all responses to a muted post visible only to the muted poster and the response poster. That at least slows the spread of the flames.
You'll never get 100% - the guy could always walk into a starbucks and log into a brand new sock-puppet account as the first access to the forum. Whatever he does, the goal is to make the amount of work the troll has to do much higher than the amount of work the board moderator has to do. Some uber-trolls will eventually install Tor and defeat much of it, but that's a lot of work and in the end you've got one more Tor user which is a good thing by itself.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There is at least one mod for forums sites that lets you "silently ban" the troll. They can continue to visit the site, post and continue to reply to messages, but nobody except the troll / troll's subnet sees them.
Full of Win, IMHO
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And the BB software which supports this feature is...?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc