On the Subject of Trolls

Occasionally comments get posted on Slashdot that hurt everyone. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes someone with a bug up their butt decides to make a nuisance of themselves by posting floods of messages into a board. These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments. Its not quite the same as an ICMP flood, but its still very much a denial of service attack. Click below to read more about the problem, and how I'm tryingt to solve it here.

So it happened again recently. You guys who read a lot probably know where but this time it was much more hurtful then usual. So I've implemented 2 changes to help prevent this from happening again.

First I added an additional scoring penalty to posts. Originally the default range of comment posting was 0 for ACs, and 1 for Registered Users. In addition, a +1 or -1 could be Registered users based on their posting history (I'm gonna use the word "Karma" to describe the sum of all moderation activity done to a given user: thanks nate). If a user has karma of +20, they get a +1 bonus to their comments. If their karm is -10, they get a -1. I've added an additional rank of -20 which ads one more -1 to the post, which will make it possible for a comment to be posted at -1.

There are only 2 accounts out of the 80,000 that are this low.

Second is a bit trickier. The code now checks for "Trolls" as part of comment validation. Essentially, when a comment is posted, a troll factor is computed for your Account and your IP. This is the sum of all moderator activity done to your account in the last 24 hours or so. If your IP or your User Account has a -5 or worse total, your comment will not be posted.

Right now there are 5 accounts in the system that should show up as trolls. 3 of them are the 3 worst offenders from the story that caused me to have to write this code.

It was hard for me to do this. I'm feeling pretty wierd because this is the first time I've ever made it impossible for anyone to post. My guess is that in the end this won't help: There is no end to the number of IPs or User Accounts a determined troll can acquire to continue pestering people trying to have a real discussion. All I can say to those of you who are offended is to try to browse at Score:1 or Score:2 because the moderation system as a whole works quite well. And to those of you who are causing the problem (and I know who you are) please grow up.

Update: 09/05 01:51 by CT : A lot of good points are being made in the comments, but let me try to justify something: I'm not trying to cause censorship, I'm trying to prevent a denial of service attack. Under this system it will be quite possible for a troll to post 5-10 comments before the system rejects him. This isn't a censorship thing: He's been given plenty of opportunity to speak, he's just screwed up. He's not trying to communicate, he's trying to drown out other speakers. This is precisely the kind of thing that we need to resolve to allow a rational discussion to continue at the scale we're dealing with here. There are most certainly loopholes here, but no system can stop all abuses. This will just make it a little trickier.

Other Ideas:

• No Anonymous Posts. You all know how I feel about this one.
• Restrict the # of comments any single IP/Account is allowed to make in a single article. This gets problematic: anyone have a good idea on how to make this fair, that will scale from 1 comment to a thousand?
• Assorted restrictions on AC posting (Allow only 1 AC per registered post? Allow only registered users to post top level comments? No AC posts after 100 comments in a story? There are dozens of ideas, but I think they all are bad)

Oh, and if enough people bitch, I'll remove the extra '-1' from new posts. I'm not convinced that its a good idea, but it *did* serve to solve the current problem.

Interesting problems, thanks for the feedback (good and bad!) I'm glad that some folks are addressing the issues instead of just swearing and screaming at each other. I'm open to any suggestions, but anything angry will simply be ignored.

Comments

Re:Karma system must change

[Tackhead]

> As someone with a "karma" rating that puts my
> posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to
> agree. There are many times when I've posted
> something off-the-cuff that I've wished I
> could specify that it should be with a score of 1.

As another "+2 karma" poster, let me just say "me too", for precisely the same reasons.

More specifically, I propose that - at the time of posting - the poster of an article ought to have:
(a) his or her karma score displayed on the "post comment" form
(b) a pull-down option to select whether the post should be posted with a score of -1, 0, 1, or 2.

As for the issue of whether or not ACs should be allowed to post, IMHO they should. While there are many trolls and abuses of this privilege, there are also benefits. I find myself reading crypto/NSA/spooky posts and science posts at level 0, largely because in the case of the former, people with clue may also have a reason to want to post anonymously, and in the case of the latter, those with clue may not post frequently enough to Slashdot to justify the trouble of registering with the site. When it comes to astronomy, I'd much rather read the AC post at 0 from the Ph.D. in Astrophysics debunking the 5-10 registered posters at +1 who have no idea what they're talking about.

It's not just the blatant trolls

[Zico]

It's not just the blatant trolls that get under your skin. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:

• "I hope TrollTech goes out of business because they won't release QT under the GPL."
• "Yay, NT support for the Alpha is being dropped and more than 100 programmers are losing their jobs."
• In this thread on Mr. Stevens's death, the announcement that all of his books have been scanned/ripped and will be posted on some IRC warez channel.
• "I wish someone would kill Bill Gates."
• The continuous venom and hoping by KDE and GNOME fanatics that the other side will end up as a complete failure. Plenty of people seem to care more that KDE turns out to be a failure than they do that GNOME actually succeeds, and vice versa.
• "Now that BSD has changed their licensing terms, let's GPL it! HAHAHAHA!"
• "You use platform X, so you're an idiot!"

Keep in mind that here I'm not talking about people who are just saying that to get everyone riled up (i.e., "real trolls"), but people who say it with true spite for other people behind it.

I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.

This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

P.S. Sorry if you've read some of this before, but I thought that this was a more appropriate thread for it.

DHCP?

[for(;;);]

1) So say someone on my ISP posts a bunch of trolls and logs off, and that when I come home from work and go online, I get assigned that IP. Will I be blocked from posting? (Rob's essay said that if your account *or* IP had a sufficently bad record, you'd be blocked. Why isn't that an "and"?)

2) I've marvelled that there's no ad-spam on slashdot. Do you guys have a team of grunts that deletes those, or do the folks who flood USENET with "Pamela suck off Tommy Lee" posts just not peruse slashdot? If there is a troupe of squirells to delete ads, maybe they can be used to delete the really bad trolls.

3) What were the offending posts that inspired this?

Another nail in the coffin of free speech.

[adturner]

Censorship on /. seems really wrong to me, especially considering the recent article posted by Hemos on Congress trying to force censorship on the media. How is this any better? I believe it is a lot worse. Rob, even you admit that this "fix" has loopholes. What about people abusing the system to lock out other people from posting? (via open proxies)

If you really want to stop things like hate speech or blatent trolls, the only way to stop them is to get/teach people to NOT respond. The only reason someone posts this on a public forum like /. is to get a rise out of people. Take that away, and the trolls go away.

Let's face it, this is a /. community problem that requires the community to fix it. No manner of technology can fix it.

I hope Rob you'll reconsider this move. 99.99999% of us may loathe 0.0001% of the posts, but that doesn't mean that we should censor them out, even if they are blatent trolls. We all have to learn to grow up and just ignore them. Trying to censor them won't make them go away; rather it will just make them more determined to find a way to work around the censorship.

Until we as a society learn that we don't really want the government/media to protect us from ourselves, we're doomed as a nation to greater losses of freedoms. By /. advocating censorship, that's just one more nail in the freedom coffin.

If you want to rate them -20 or something like that, so that people have to opt-in to read trolls, that's fine. But don't kill the posts.

Re:Ratings system

[Eg0r]

I would agree with you if we were talking about normal posters (in the sense grown-up, at least half-responsible people) not sick kids just looking for attention.

How many people will be turned away from /. by those events?

Tom Christiansen sure looked disgusted with Good riddance, Slashdot in the title of his post.

I understand that seeking attention is part of the puberty process, but if you kids have really chosen Linux as your operating system of choice because you think it has potential, not just because you hate (or think you hate) Windows, then please, act so.

Good way to get attention from the linux crowd:

• Submit interesting/meaningful comments... Be mature, that's you're chance to be listened to!
• Code! Didn't Alan Cox said something like he wished /. would be more first patch! rather than frst psot!!!!!!
• If you can't code, do something for the community! submit bug reports, write documentation, help people installing Linux...
• Last but not least, please do not annoy anybody... Sure this isn't a perfect world, but if you call yourself a Linux user, behave like one and show respect.

Do kids really get a kick behaving like assholes? Is that it? Well kids, seat back and think about the way you have hurt W. Richard Stevens's family. The guy is dead. He was well respected and a lot of people will miss him because he wrote good unix books and knew in depth the stuff he was talking about. Think about the way you have made not only /. ACs look like assholes, but the whole site, and put shame on the Linux community... it's bad.

Now, nobody actually asked you to use Linux. If you get pissed at people because you can't use it, there are alternatives!
Download the latest litestep and show your hax0r dude friends on IRC how cool you are while running those warscr1pts on your illegal copy of mirc...

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Re:Karma system must change

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

As someone with a "karma" rating that puts my posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to agree. There are many times when I've posted something off-the-cuff that I've wished I could specify that it should be with a score of 1. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that a lot of the automatic 2s belong to people who wouldn't agree (though then again, by making it to an automatic 2 they likely are more open-minded).

What I really dislike is how many of the automatic 2s are because of funny posts. IMO, 'funny' points shouldn't count towards positive karma. Conversely, 'troll' points should count twice towards negative karma or, perhaps, if the -5 daily karma limit is hit, that should count as an additional of -5 overall karma too.

One flaw with your treatise, however... rather than doing a hard reset every 2 or 3 weeks, the "karma zone" should just take a running time period of 2 or 3 weeks. So, the comments I post in the last 2 or 3 weeks would count towards my karma.

Another thing that would help with is the opposite of the problem with automatic moderation up: moderators are, as far as I've observed, less likely to moderate up a comment which is already scored 2. The only notable exception of this is certain people whose comments always immediately get moderated up to +5 for being insightful (*cough*Bruce Perens*cough*), though I'm not too bitter about that since said peoples' posts usually are insightful or informative. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.