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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.

52 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. And here I thought... by cruff · · Score: 4, Funny

    When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.

    1. Re:And here I thought... by jc42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.

      Yeah, me too. A couple of years ago, some clients wanted a drupal-based web site, and I thought it looked interesting, so I, uh, "volunteered" to learn to use it. I bought a couple of textbooks, and found online teaching sites. A month later, I'd produced nothing useful. I'd asked a good number of "How do you ...?" questions on the forum, and the people there were very nice -- but they never actually answered my questions. All sorts of things I tried didn't do at all what I expected, and often I couldn't figure out just what they did instead. Finally, the client was getting tired of saying "We need something soon", so I spent a week building their site by hand, mostly by writing a bunch of perl CGI programs that generated the site from their data. They liked it, started asking for more features, and they're still clients (though the site mostly runs itself now).

      Since then, I've had occasion to advise others looking at drupal to "Don't bother." Or sometimes "You'll be sorry." And I've read a lot of similar comments from others, so I guess it hasn't gotten much better.

      Drupal does have some good PR, though, and they're pretty good at impressing non-techie managers. And they might have some good stuff, if you can figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. I can't tell whether it's good or not, because I seem to be too dumb to understand how to make it work.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    2. Re:And here I thought... by elfprince13 · · Score: 2

      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"

    3. Re:And here I thought... by operator_error · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Drupal is first and foremost a professional publisher's platform with no compromises or apology. Drupal upgrades between versions are something I'll choose not even to discuss; because the pros know what to do already. Developer's are supposed to learn how to handle the professional tools for the job; it can take years for the pros to do this, and often does.

      There's advantages and disadvantages to everything, so why not embrace the advantages while trying to work past any (initial?) disadvantages?

      One advantage Drupal offers as opposed to rolling your own is the security of a lot of eyeballs against common SQL injection attacks, which seems ultimately responsible for taking down HBGary and the probably the Sony PSN network too. Hey, the White House uses Drupal publicly, and internally to replace famously-inept emails systems, along with NASA, the congress, the Economist.com...

      Also from the owners' point of view, the Drupal framework is going to be easier to support than your system if you're not around, (and you can sell that as a feature, now).

    4. Re:And here I thought... by mangu · · Score: 2

      Your points are very relevant about the roll your own vs. use a framework debate, but Drupal is not the only framework available.

      What I would like to see is a comparison between Drupal, Rails, and Django. The problem is finding a way to compare those three without falling immediately into a flame war.

    5. Re:And here I thought... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 2

      If it takes years for a professional to learn how to effectively use any piece of software, that's a sign that the software is very poorly designed indeed.

    6. Re:And here I thought... by cwgmpls · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You think Drupal has gotten to over 7 million installs based on good PR? I've been building Drupal sites for over four years. I remember the first time I tried it, I had a site up and running from scratch in a couple hours. I'm not sure what you bought the textbooks for. The facts speak for themselves: over 7 million installs, and one person who can't "understand how to make it work".

    7. Re:And here I thought... by cwgmpls · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You won't find a framework comparison between Drupal, Rails and Django, because Drupal is not a framework. Drupal is a CMS. Rails and Django are frameworks. You can used Rails and Django to build a CMS if you want to. You can't use Drupal to build a CMS, because it already is one. You'll find plenty of comparisons between Rails and Django if you Google them -- they are both frameworks. You'll also find plenty of comparisons between Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and Plone -- they are all CMSs. You won't find a framework comparison between Drupal, Rails and Django.

    8. Re:And here I thought... by macinnisrr · · Score: 2

      What's so hard about Drupal? It was the first CMS I ever used (before that I had built sites with Kompozer, iWeb, and Dreamweaver, and before that, I used old fashioned HTML in the 90s), and I found it not only easy to use, but that being able to use modules for ecommerce, flash, mp3s, rotating banners, etc. made the whole site WAY more appealing to users at a level of complexity I could never do on my own (I tried hacking together bits of java, flash, etc. in the past). Not only that, but once it's set up, like all CMS systems, I can administer from the web, from anywhere, and it just works. I didn't even buy a book, just read tutorials and did google searches on the things I couldn't figure out on my own (admittedly not very much). I had considered myself very much an amateur before using Drupal, and I'm certainly no programmer, but now I use it to administer three of my own sites and two that I was hired to create for people I know. Drupal is great for its flexibility and easy interface, but I would agree that it's a bit overkill for 90% of the sites people create, where all they need is a simple information site with some pictures. If that's the case, use wordpress. P.S. Although I recommend Wordpress for simple sites, when I first used it after having done a couple sites in Drupal, I was utterly baffled at the differences, and I'm sure it works both ways.

    9. Re:And here I thought... by mattack2 · · Score: 2

      Drupal upgrades between versions are something I'll choose not even to discuss; because the pros know what to do already.

      Why don't you discuss it?

      I would expect a "professional publisher's platform" to be able to handle upgrades between versions seamlessly, or very close to that (possibly tool-assisted migration path).

      I would expect a hack someone threw together and grew into a monster to be a pain in the !@$# to upgrade between versions, if it were even possible without major rewrites.

    10. Re:And here I thought... by operator_error · · Score: 2

      How long does it take to learn to develop SAP or Oracle business applications, for example? How much does such a job pay? Maybe 'relatively complex' environments have something going for them after all? I mean these things are in-place with their own markets for developers to engage in. (And books exist, while open-source code is actually a.v.a.i.l.a.b.l.e, and legal!) If one expects everything to be sugar-coated as simple as an iPhone GUI, one might expect to earn less per day as well. The converse is true as well. Supply and demand always applies, like it's a natural law or something.

    11. Re:And here I thought... by BitterOak · · Score: 2

      It does take a different way of thinking but is nice once you have it working. I do some consulting work with it and it is one of the better platforms I've found to work on, but only after really learning the ins and outs of it.

      It's not easy to learn those ins and outs, though. I went through several books before I found one I could learn out of (Pro Drupal Development, 2nd Ed. was the one I finally learned something from, but even it wasn't as complete as I really needed.)

      --
      If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  2. Alternatively by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Alternatively by greg1104 · · Score: 2

      Another easy way to randomly delay users, show them the wrong data, and return 404 errors under load is to build your site with one of those trendy Rails frameworks. Make sure to use MySQL with MyISAM "for speed" if you want even more inexplicable service outages.

      A third implementation would be to redirect the trolls over to the version of the site hosted in "the cloud".

  3. Trolls by parlancex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Trolls by _0xd0ad · · Score: 5, Informative

      So that would be...

      If you want to give your trolls the silent treatment try the Cave module.

    2. Re:Trolls by parlancex · · Score: 2

      They might, but not as fast as they would if the accounts were simply banned. There's probably also a good number of trolls who only bother to create a new account when their current account is banned.

    3. Re:Trolls by FriendlyPrimate · · Score: 5, Funny

      Interesting. Why do you feel that 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?

    4. Re:Trolls by parlancex · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And actually now that I think about it, you might as well just put all the troll flagged accounts into the same bubble, so they could see each other's posts, but they would all be invisible to everyone else. That would be much more difficult to detect.

    5. Re:Trolls by operagost · · Score: 2

      Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    6. Re:Trolls by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

      you might as well just put all the troll flagged accounts into the same bubble, so they could see each other's posts, but they would all be invisible to everyone else.

      That was seriously considered for an early MMORPG. Annoying players would be dumped into a dungeon level full of NPCs and other annoying players, where they could flame war and player kill as long as they wanted, without bothering anybody else. It wasn't done due to resource constraints, but it remains a good idea.

    7. Re:Trolls by blair1q · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, it's a total success. We called it World of Warcraft.

    8. Re:Trolls by Tynin · · Score: 2

      One of the places I worked at provided shared web hosting. It was pretty normal for a single server to have ~300 accounts on them, and generally the servers would purr along without any issues. Customers who were constantly eating up more than their share of resources would get silently migrated over to what we called the swamp servers. That way all the customers who were resource hogs but to cheap to go with a VPS/dedicated server/colo solution could use as much resources as they wanted with other abusive users. This was ~12 years ago.

  4. Re:For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... by recoiledsnake · · Score: 5, Funny

    HTML code

    --
    This space for rent.
  5. Re:For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... by RagManX · · Score: 2

    Almost any modern HTML + CSS page? :)

  6. Bad idea. by CountBrass · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:If you believe any of this is a good idea... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    Users are an asset(unless your site is purely a hobby for your amusement); but, in sites that feature any sort of user interaction, some assets have a net negative value.

    If a user is bad enough to drive others away, getting rid of them is the strategy that maximizes the size of your userbase. Once you factor in the fact that users vary in level of quality, terminating the undesirables starts to look even more attractive.

    For websites that are of the simple 1 user interacting with some interface/body of data/whatever, sure, it doesn't make sense to drive off anybody who isn't actively destructive. If community dynamics come into it, though, you will quickly run into the fact that some people will bleed a community dry and then tubgirl its shriveled husk. If you want a userbase, you don't want them.

  8. Crashing IE6, eh? by lluBdeR · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is there a way I can enable this, like, sitewide by default, punished user or not?

    1. Re:Crashing IE6, eh? by Amouth · · Score: 2

      yes just put

      <script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>

      at the start of the page - have fun

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    2. Re:Crashing IE6, eh? by Abstrackt · · Score: 2

      Is there a way I can enable this, like, sitewide by default, punished user or not?

      Easy. Put the following snippet in all your pages: <script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>

      --
      They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
  9. Re:their/they're by smelch · · Score: 5, Funny

    Really? Thank you so fucking much. Nobody knew that at all. It certainly couldn't have just been a slip, it had to come from ignorance. I'm so excited that I can come to this free internet to learn about grammar from such excellent minds as yours.

    --
    If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
  10. Re:their/they're by tonytraductor · · Score: 2

    You beat me too it.

  11. A bit uncomfortable... by Aphrika · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re:A bit uncomfortable... by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      It won't take out the machine. It just makes IE6 close. Personally this should be run on every webserver by default.

  12. DailyKos by mr100percent · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:DailyKos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's perfectly valid to be in favor of free speech, but not want to hear everything everybody has to say. I think that piece of shit preacher from Florida is perfectly within his rights to do whatever he wants to a book he owns, but I won't watch him do it.

      If I called you an asshole, and you walked away, I could hardly claim you don't care about free speech since you're not listening to me any more. You've just decided you have better things to do with your time.

      You can claim that somebody is not interested in challenging his own ideas if he ignores everything to the contrary (think birthers); but that's a separate issue. Denying somebody the right to speak in your house is not a First Amendment issue or a free speech issue: he can still speak, but he's not guaranteed an audience.

    2. Re:DailyKos by StevenMaurer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You had me going right up to the end of your sentence.

      "Goose stepping" ?!? DailyKos may not be your cup of tea, but they are pretty solidly in the middle of what is considered the "left" in the U.S., and would be considered "centrist" or even "center right" in Europe. The fact that you are making an obvious allusion of them to the NAZI Brownshirts, over them excercising a tiny amount of editorial control of what remains on their site, shows far more about you than it does about them.

      Also, for your eidification, "Free Speech" means "freedom from government repression for expressing your opinion", not "freedom to deface other people's property with messages that they consider offensive". I also know, courtesy of FOX, that there have been offensive leftist things posted on that website by various anonymous flamers, which they have promptly removed.

      The only "moron" here is the person who posted a Godwin troll while complaining about some website's anti-troll policy.

      No wait - scratch that. The morons who upvoted you as "Insightful" are more to blame. At least you can type.

    3. Re:DailyKos by jc42 · · Score: 2

      You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.

      Yes, I do. For the same reason that, if you come to my house and start putting up political signs all over the lawn and walls, I'll remove them. If you persist, I may file charges.

      Web sites aren't free (in the $ sense). It costs me money to run a web site, and part of the cost is disk space. If you and your buddies descend on my web site and start filling up my disks with garbage (as defined by me, of course), I'm going to remove it. I can't afford the unbounded disk space that all the political nutcases in the world would happily fill.

      Actually, I'm involved with running a number of web sites for organizations, some of them political. I've discussed how open the site should be with all of them. I tend to err on the "open" side, but in every case so far, they've all been quite concerned with the potential problems with unlimited "free speech", i.e., permanent support for the disk space for whatever nonsense any troll may want to post on their site. Even the "liberal" groups are worried about this, and often push some fairly strict controls on what can be posted. I do encourage openness as the default, but I also give them the tools they need to limit the damage of trolls and vandals.

      Oh, and I should add "and marketers". It turns out that one of the main problems running online forums is being discovered by a marketer. When this happens, you often find your disk(s) completely filled with gigabytes of advertising. The tools that the marketers have for this can be impressive. Overnight, you can find that every message in your forum has hundreds or thousands of replies, each one an "I agree" statement and a link to a commercial web site.

      So, until we all have an infinite amount of free disk space available on our servers, we have little choice but to limit what can be posted to our sites. And yes, we can support "free speech" while doing this without being hypocrites. Free speech doesn't include the right to mob a site and bury it under piles of garbage (as defined by the site's owners).

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    4. Re:DailyKos by makomk · · Score: 2

      Except there's more to the idea of free speech than the first amendment or the law: the idea of free speech is that good ideas are supposed to drive out bad ones, and that doesn't work if factual, well-argued comments are deleted for having an inconvenient viewpoint. Deleting trolls and flames is no problem, but as someone else pointed out it's often not the troll comments that get deleted - they may disrupt the discussion, but if anything the opposition helps strengthen the other commenters' belief.

      The other problem is that a lot of site owners want to have their cake and eat it. Sure, they have the right to control what goes on their site fairly arbitrarily, but if they're deleting comments that make them look bad, or point out flaws or issues with their arguments, or even worse point out important information they've omitted for political reasons, I want to know about it so that I don't get the false impression that an honest, open discussion is happening and can look elsewhere for information.

      Oddly enough, few site owners want to do this: one of the recurring patterns I've seen is comments referencing questionable comment deletions being themselves deleted, so that other users continue to have the false impression it's an actual discussion and that no-one thinks there's anything wrong. Probably because once you know a website's reached this level of dishonesty, where they're systematically hiding relevant information and arguments from you and deleting comments to achieve this, why bother going there anymore? It's just not worth it - by the time you've gone to the effort of triple-checking everything they say, you're better off moving to another site...

  13. Harming your users by SirGarlon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  14. Re:For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... by _0xd0ad · · Score: 2

    Well... I successfully crashed IE7 with this:

    function f(){document.body.innerHTML+="<div style='height:1px;width:1px;position:absolute;'></div>";window.setInterval("f();",1);}window.setInterval("f();",1);

    (Well - it hasn't crashed, yet, but it's not responding, pegging the CPU and slowly ballooning in memory. I'm pretty sure it'll crash eventually.)

  15. Re:their by colinRTM · · Score: 4, Funny

    Irregardless, your gay and I could care less.

  16. Re:If you believe any of this is a good idea... by mlts · · Score: 2

    What may be better is to use the cave module, or Beehive's "worm mode".

    If you ban a severe troll, they will run around creating new sock puppet accounts. However, if you turn on code that allows them to post, with nobody else ever seeing it, they will happily run around flaming people left and right... then get their hackles up because they see nobody responding. Finally, the troll puts up a "bah, you guys suck" notice and leaves for good.

    Really dedicated trolls can get around bans [1]. The trick is to make them waste so much time spinning their wheels with their existing user, where it is easily watched, and on an extreme case, law enforcement can be notified.

    [1]: Of course, one can have manual user registration approved by an admin, but it is hard to tell a troll hiding behind a VPN address from someone genuine who is new to the board.

  17. Re:their/they're by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2

    You should of ;-) included then/than.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  18. Re:their/they're by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.

    I think you've found your new sig. ;-)

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  19. Re:their/they're by geekoid · · Score: 2

    You call that a sentence?

    Who is glad? who are you helping? are you helping yourself?

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  20. Re:For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... by ais523 · · Score: 2

    When I was at school, I crashed what IIRC was IE4 (on, I think, windows 95) by creating a frameset that referred to itself. It didn't just take down IE, but also the Start menu (which on a computer where control-alt-delete was restricted by policy, made it rather interesting to log out afterwards). For bonus points, it popped up a "this program is using a lot of memory, do you want to exit it?" dialog box, but both the "Yes" and "No" buttons had no effect.

    --
    (1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
  21. Developer doesn't understand chance. by webbiedave · · Score: 2

    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;
    }

  22. Re:their/they're by similar_name · · Score: 2

    I have no idea why people think 'lead' is the past tense of -uh- 'lead'

    Probably because 'read' is the past tense of 'read'.

  23. Re:their/they're by similar_name · · Score: 2

    I'll except it :)

  24. Re:If you believe any of this is a good idea... by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of my car hacking websites has this... It's called the troll bin. All the users that get marked as troll can post all they want but nobody but themselves or another troll see it. If you get a rep level above 20 (20 people liked your post) it appears visible to you and you can go and browse the troll bin for reading fun.

    I have wasted many hours laughing at how the trolls get all pissed that nobody is responding, then another troll responds, and they troll each other. Every once in a while they figure it out and leave, but some are still there after 4 years.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  25. Re:their/they're by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

    You call that a sentence?

    Who is glad? who are you helping? are you helping yourself?

    No, it is some person named "Glad I" who could help.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.