Slashdot Mirror
Punish Bad Users With Drupal Misery
If you're sick of banning or deleting troublemakers on your Drupal website, you might want to check out Misery, the module designed to give trolls a taste of their own medicine. Creating a random length delay for a user, redirecting them to a random page, presenting them with a 404 error, and crashing their browser if they're using IE6 are just a few of the things you can make users endure with Misery. I'm still waiting patiently for a Punch In the Nose module, but this is a good start.
their
their
their
their
Seriously, it's they're. That just looks sloppy.
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
"Their" denotes ownership, "They're" is short for they are.
But it wouldn't accept it for some reason...
If Misery isn't enough for you, you can try the module "Crime Against Humanity". It forces the trolls to admin a site that runs Drupal.
What code are they using to crash IE6?
This won't just be used on "bad" users, but anybody who upsets a given mod with power but no responsibility.
It's really not too bad an issue, so you get banned one site, it's not important, move on with your live, letting other people define you is as unhealthy as succumbing to total narcissism. But still, it's wrong.
Knowing when to move on, not because you are bad, but because you can't change others, because you don't deserve mistreatment is important though.
slashdot? their stagnated.
then you have no business running a website. Period. Just leave it to the professionals. Why on earth would anyone even think to do these things? Your users, good or bad, are an asset. Fucking with them intentionally makes you, the site owner as bad as your worst, most annoying contributors.
You may now gaze upon my greatness.
I always thought the most effective way to combat trolls would be to silently flag their account, allowing them to post and continue viewing the forums as normal, but everything they do is completely invisible. The system could also generate fake replies to their replies and threads, also completely invisible.
By serving 40% of your malicious users with a delay, you actually spend more resources (mostly memory) on trolls. Sure, in 60% of the cases, you spend nearly nothing, but it sure opens possibilities for DDoS attacks: open accounts, troll a lot, get miserable and simply troll harder.
Bad idea.
All it will do is generate hundreds of bug reports.
And. It doesn't really address the problem. If 'Misery' can auto-magically detect trolling why not just auto-ban or auto-suspend and give an explanation?
That assumes of course that 'Misery' can detect trolling reliably -which I doubt- so realistically it's going to annoy 'normal' users, ie the ones your web site presumably wants to keep, who will just think your web site is badly written and buggy.
In short: it's a stupid idea and a stupid plugin.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I wonder who I pissed off! :-)
I'm still waiting patiently for a Punch In the Nose module, but this is a good start.
Personally, I'm waiting for the module that shuts your computer off, drops a dictionary on your desk, and refuses to let you power the computer back on until you've learned the difference between their and its heterographs.
"browser if their using IE6" in the original post is incorrect. It should be 'they are'.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Behold, we have a Luser Attitude Re-adjustment Tool.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
escalate
I can't just post the word "nigger," it keeps 404-ing me.
Is there a way I can enable this, like, sitewide by default, punished user or not?
Aren't there modules like this for pretty much any big software package out there? I know I've installed stuff like this in vBulletin, phpBB and I made one for SMF.
designed for Admins who are as childish as the trolls.
...with the IE6 crashing thing. Granted, it's turned off by default which is a good thing. Looking through the other options, they all affect the way the troublemaker interacts with the site, so essentially are all within the realms of the site owners responsibility.
Crashing a browser is actively and knowingly interfering with the users local software and could have unknown consequences, moreso if it manages to take their entire machine out.
Other than that, it's a nice and interesting way of messing with your online nemeses.
DailyKos has a better way to deal with Trolls. Enough downvotes and the system makes all their posts invisible to the rest of the users. The troll still sees them so he/she wouldn't know they're essentially locked out (at least not right away).
Harming your users doesn't seem to me a good idea at all. Adding more bad behavior to the Internet is unlikely to improve anyone's situation. And crashing their browsers? That crosses an ethical line, in my opinion. What's next, infecting them with malware out of spite?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
This is pretty funny in theory, but in practice, as others have noted, it's not really very professional or a good idea..
Better off just banning them, using CAPTCHA, etc.
Deliberately degrade your own services. Sounds like a great plan.
The primary problem with trolls is that they get fed. Other users MUST feed trolls - They're powerless to resist. You can scream DON'T FEED THE TROLLS at the top of your lungs yet time after time after time yet they'll still be fed, everywhere, all the time. If you could somehow figure out how to address the other users who feed the trolls, the trolls would eventually starve and die off. Of course, getting rid of spam would be easier than this, as it goes against human nature, but if it could be solved the troll problem would go away...
silently flag their account, allowing them to post and continue viewing the forums as normal, but everything they do is completely invisible.
That's the Graklaw Pan Jones Module...
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/groklaw-accused-of-censorship/7826
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I've been trolling reddit a lot recently. They've clearly added a similar feature.
I want to see a module that would let us know how much money /. gets anytime it publishes one of these Drupal articles, can you do that?
If 'Misery' can auto-magically detect trolling why not just auto-ban or auto-suspend and give an explanation? That assumes of course that 'Misery' can detect trolling reliably -which I doubt- so realistically it's going to annoy 'normal' users, ie the ones your web site presumably wants to keep, who will just think your web site is badly written and buggy. In short: it's a stupid idea and a stupid plugin.
I agree: stupid assumptions lead to a stupid premise which results in one coming to stupid conclusions.
TL;DR: RTFA
A Troll is as easily just somebody you don't like. Calling somebody a troll is an easy way to dismiss them, but there are plenty of people who call others trolls just because it is such a powerful name.
Anyone who's ever read Dailykos, even briefly, would have noticed much disagreement among the users. From the split between Hillary and Obama supporters in 2008, toward opinions regarding things like the Health Care bill, the site is far from any sort of "group think." The premise of the site is "electing more and better Democrats", all conversations start from that premise but hardly arrive at a consensus of opinion. But it's true, the site doesn't allow debate on things like repealing Social Security; it's antithetical to the premise. I'm sorry that such a simple concept is confusing to you.
doesn't mean that people are group thinkers or goose-stepping morons because they don't want to read everything a troll posts to a message board. It never has meant that and hopefully never will mean that.
They could just make their website as impossible to navigate and use as Slashdot has made theirs.
From Misery documentation:
# Delay: Create a random-length delay, giving the appearance of a slow connection. (by default this happens 40% of the time)
# White screen: Present the user with a white-screen. (by default this happens 10% of the time)
These events do not occur x% of the time but, rather, have an x% chance of occurring.
$random_number = rand(0, 100);
if ($chance >= $random_number) {
return TRUE;
}
Time is limited. If a group is trying to develop a consensus of opinion or discuss the nuances within an issue, it would be self-defeating to waste time having conversations that are off-topic. Just as an anti-abortion blog isn't going to discuss the merits of making Plan B prescriptions available to women, a blog that is devoted to electing Democrats isn't going to waste it's time discussing another party's platform: that discussion has already been had by the very definition of people already deciding that they want to be part of a group dedicated to electing Democrats. Why would they waste their time discussing an issue that they've already reached a conclusion on? By your logic, at the next townhall I go to, I should raise my hand and ask my rep "So, are we sure we've thought this revolt against King George through? Belonging to the British empire, does have it's merits...
Eliza? I've been wondering how long till you got on slashdot!
...give them admin privileges.
I came to this discussion thread looking for a HatfulOfHollow reference. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I think Microsoft has been using this for awhile on windowsupdate.com. every time i do a fresh install and go there with IE6, i sit through 3-12 crashes while loading the page. normally i just give up and let auto-update do the work.
And THAT ladies and gentlemen, is why sites like Kos need to implement things like this. "socialists" and "goose-stepping" in the same post. Wow! Who wants to read this kind of drivel? I'm just waiting for the slashdot system to kick in. Come on mods...
Great post, but then you missed it on dylsexia.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Oh, I see... they mean "Somebody who says things we don't agree with", or "Somebody who is winning an argument with us", or "Somebody who can actually think and question things, and that scares me..."
Seriously. We now have the ability to talk about anything in the world, with thousands of other people, anonymously, so that we can say what we really feel. But idiots who use the word "troll" are doing everything they can to prevent free speech- because they themselves are too stupid to be able to actually debate important issues. You see it all the time - somebody goes on a forum and dares to mention the fact that European countries (i.e. white countries) are being invaded by millions of third worlders, who are clearly going to turn those countries into the same as their own countries - i.e. third world countries, and you are labelled a 'troll', and the Leftwing idiots think they have achieved something...
I have done a few drupal sites, nothing overly complex. I did come into it later so didn't touch the early releases. I recently needed a CMS and used 7.x. I was pleasantly surprised at the ease of use. As it's an easy site and I haven't had to look at any programming I can't speak for under the hood, but for this easy one I'm impressed.
Earlier than that it was done in MUD (Multi User Dungeon ; command line itnerface RPG for you youngling). We had a special prison room, where you could not recall, you could not suicide, you could not die, you could not use any channel or send any tell. Once there your perso was in effect in Lymbo without anyway to go out but the good grace of the admin. usually reserved for AFK macro'er (you would call them botter nowadays) and abuser or repetitive breaking of rules. Naturally there was the IP perma ban ...Usually not used unless one was relatively sure the Ip of the user was always the same.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
crashing their browser if they're using IE6
For the longest time I thought this was a built-in feature of IE6.
I haven't used it for a wihle so forgive me if it's gone; but Slashdot has historicly given you the ability to ignore posts below a certain rating. Yahoo forums do this now too.
I've always thought it would be interesting to have more than one dimension to the ratings. Let's say you have a preference for "Funny Troll" posts. Instead of Funny+, Troll-, the equation would be something like (Funny AND Troll) ? (Funny-Troll) : (Funny+Troll);
It could be really flexible if you gave users the ability to enter a small snippet of code, which would be eval'd. Surely there is some Perl regex line-noise that would let you enter a simple equation and not something dangerous.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I, even as a hardcore Drupal fan for many years, can perfectly understand what you mean and confirm that dubness is not necessarily involved if you failed to achieve your goals with Drupal. To Drupal's defense I would like to mention three points:
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
So I'm sorry, someone basically took the Miserable Users hack for vBulletin originally released in 2004 and -- 7 years later -- ported it to Drupal??
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=59727&page=8
Astounding. Neither original, nor news, nor particularly interesting.
There are many powerful, easy-to-use and easy-to-develop for open source CMS systems available; Drupal is not one of them.
--
Psych Central
http://psychcentral.com/
Aggressive way to punish these people, making their experience miserable(er) surely won't do much to fix their attitude or directly make them feel unwelcome... Then again, I guess website developers aren't here to police the web for everyone else...
system that some people would not stop using when the new system went live. He wanted to make it such a pain to use the old one that they would just start using the new one. The more you used it, the worse it gain.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Why replicate core Drupal?
You're not alone. I'm the webmaster for several 501(c)3's, including one that I helped found, and everyone clamors for Drupal. I looked at the documentation on 4 or 5 occasions and said "No thanks, I'll roll my own much more quickly"
Drupal is crappy and so is WordPress, it is being constantly hacked the problem is chmod. If you think it is going to go away think again PHP safe on is a must, geo location is also important, if you do not understand the basics you have no business.
All cows eat grass!
This could be unlawful in some jurisdictions where it would be considered tortuous interference with the right to use one's own property.
I've often commented that the Drupal community is a piranha pool. Many Drupal developers come off as arrogant, and do little to help newbies, instead nibbling away at their desire to learn Drupal. This whole idea of Misery seems to be conceived by the ideals of the Drupal community. Instead of just being straight out and banning someone, they are going to make their websites a real pain to use. I get the bad feeling some of them won't just be using it on trolls, but ordinary users as well.
"If you're sick of banning or deleting troublemakers on your Drupal website..." You've got your configuration messed up, read the beginner docs.
Bob Snodgrass
p90x workout