They enjoy creating chaos on message boards and making peoples' lives miserable in chatrooms. Even the most well-regulated online communities have been infiltrated by them. If you're a visitor to any site with a board or room, you're going to run into one, eventually. If you're a board admin, eventually you'll have to decide how to deal with them. Trolls: nobody likes them except themselves, but, as much as we might wish them away, they're not mythical. They're real, and we, as a community, rather than fighting them on their own low-brow terms, should take the high road and discuss how to confront them.
To that end, I'd like to toss out a few ideas I've read or thought up, and see what people think about them. Cast your vote for your favorite.
I believe we're all in agreement that shouting at them does not work. To that end, here are a few potential ways of dealing with them, with my opinions on each thrown in.
Ban them.
A very definitive way of ending the menace of a troll. Quickly ends the threat by cutting off access to the site. There are ways to get around it, however, such as creating multiple accounts, having multiple IPs, etc. Furthermore, everybody has an opinion on who is and who is not a troll. Heated conversations can lead to one person demanding the other be banned, the eventual product of which is community implosion. I believe that while neccessary in certain situations, the use of bans should not be widespread.
Live with them.
Can be effective, as long as there are few trolls. However, one need only go and look at sites like Yahoo to see what effect a large group of trolls can have on a community. Not a good idea, since this community is growing.
Make their comments visible only to themselves.
A very interesting idea. If this were implemented, I'd suggest that it work something like this:
Much like how someone with a high enough Mojo can see Hidden Comments, someone with a low enough Mojo should automatically have their comments be relegated to the Hidden area. Kind of like being in the "penalty box". After the timer runs down (say, 1 hour), their comments are again made visible to the whole community, and their Mojo is reset to neutral. For the troll, however, the threshold their overall Mojo must reach before they will be put into the "penalty box" is permanently (or quasi-permanently) adjusted upwards. So, say it takes an overall rating of 1.25 for the average user to be put into the "penalty box". For the troll, that rating is now 1.5. The next time they get put into the box, it becomes 1.75, and so on. Eventually, if the troll keeps it up, their messages will forever be hidden, because they'll always be in the box.
This could allow the community to police itself and keep out trolls. It could, however, unless properly implemented, lead to abuse. Known trolls would have to have their ability to rate comments adjusted downwards, as well, or eliminated completely. Also, at the same time, a way would have to be devised for preventing what I'll call "Mojo-cliques", or groups of trolls (or even ordinary users) who go around rating each others comments really high and others really low so that those that aren't in their group aren't sent to the box without warrant.
Let each user select whether or not to block a troll.
Overall, I think this would be the best idea. Other boards have initiated measures where each user has a "block" list. Messages posted by users on that list won't be visible to the list-bearer. Similiarly, on boards like these with a rating system, the individuals on the list-bearer's list should not be able to see the messages posted by the list-bearer, in order to prevent them from retaliating by giving the list-bearer's comments low ratings.
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Those are just my ideas regarding the way to deal with trolls. Please feel free to post any other ideas to this board.
Oh, and if BillM says, "F*** You" to me, I'll wear it like a badge!!!