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Punish Bad Users With Drupal Misery

Posted by samzenpus on from the what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-griefer dept.

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.

22 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 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).

    3. 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".

    4. 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.

  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.

  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 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?

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

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

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

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

    HTML code

    --
    This space for rent.
  5. 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.
  6. Crashing IE6, eh? by lluBdeR · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  7. 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.
  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.
  11. Re:their by colinRTM · · Score: 4, Funny

    Irregardless, your gay and I could care less.