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Getting Rid of Trolls In WordPress 44

Posted by timothy from the does-not-kill-bugs-dead dept.
CypherXero writes "I recently had to deal with a bunch of unwelcomed trolls to my blog, and it became my number one priority to stop it before it got out of hand. Luckily for me, I'm using WordPress, so I had a lot of great options for stopping trolls."
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Getting Rid of Trolls In WordPress More

Getting Rid of Trolls In WordPress

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  • How is this a story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomcio.s ( 455520 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @10:19AM (#10450756) Homepage Journal
    How does this constitute a story?

    So some guy figured out how to work WordPress webapp. Good for him. How is this news for nerds, or stuff that matters?

    I really don't care if some guy has managed to set up his site correctly. Good for him, but why waste our time with this?

    I will probably be modded as a troll, but someone has to go and say this. Slashdot has been slipping. There is so much good content out there, why do we have to read about this shite?
    • I agree the article is quite poor. One of his "solutions" is to remove all the vowels from troll posts after determining their IP address - wow the trolls must be quaking in their boots! And have you seen his tiny word list [collegechixors.com] I mean whats the point with such a small list? His other "solutions" involve manually approving posts.

      I was hoping this might be some way of autmatically dealing with trolls.
      • Agreed. But am I the only one for whom the browser (Firefox) disemvowels that page? I get a lot of text such as "âoeDiscussionsâ" for (I guess) any text which is meant to be highlighted in some way.
      • Another difficulty, how do you know how that word is used, it may be part of a legitimate discussion, or it may be a troll. I remember web filtering horror stories, where pages of honors graduates "cum laude" and breast cancer pages were blocked.

        Funny story, I had dsl installed recently, during install the guy couldn't make an account. Finally tracked it down to my name it didn't like the homo in homolka. I changed my account name, and it worked fine.
    • How is this news for nerds, or stuff that matters?

      Because many of us, as nerds, have blogs and therefore trolls. Any discussion about reducing the effects of trolls and trolling occurances is, I'm guessing, really interesting to a lot of people here. Is it a treatise of the effects and coutermeasures of trolling? Nope. Does is discuss a couple of the more popular ways to deal with trolls? Yes.

      No one forces you to read slashdot. You are going to see articles that *you* think are stupid. But just mo

  • I've always looked for ways other people did it. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dubious9 ( 580994 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @10:20AM (#10450769) Journal
    I believe I have written [slashdot.org] a little about trolls here but, blogs are the unfortunately the best place to troll. Places like slashdot get their fair share but the "many eyes" benefits quickly put them into obscurity. Though when one latches onto your site with only a handful of readers, it can be very hard to persuade them to move elsewhere.

    Trolls are often very smart and if they see active counter measures like IP-banning and "disemvoweling" they are likely to find one of the many ways around those countermeasures because they know they're annoying someone.

    The best thing I can think of is to have a slashdot-like mechanism where you're the only mod and everybody starts at -1 (only the subject of their reply visible). You check in a couple times a day and "promote" comments so that the entire body is seen. But that rather draconian.

    Hmm... like spam there's no clear way to stop trolls, only minimize the pleasure they get from trolling. If you have a clear and consistant plan before the trolls hit, I'm guessing you'll be better prepared. And yes, you've seen it here, the best advice is "Don't feed the trolls".
    • It occurs to me that you could auto-moderate via whitelisting. So those folks on your "angels" list would automatically get a 2+ score. Those on your "not-a-troll-so-far" list would get a 1. Those on your "definitely a troll" list would get a -1.

      Oh, and I would never allow anonymous posting. It's just too much frickin work.

      Thoughts?
      • The only thing wrong with modding trolls down automatically is that they'll just create a new account without that restriction. Then you'll drive trolls do just do one troll per account.

        Like I said active counter measures don't do very well when the whole point of being a troll is getting attention. The whitelist thing is good, but many blog sites have a lot of one or few time posters. When you're running a blog you're not really trying to create a community (where the whitelist would work well) but rat
    • Hmm... like spam there's no clear way to stop trolls, only minimize the pleasure they get from trolling. If you have a clear and consistant plan before the trolls hit, I'm guessing you'll be better prepared. And yes, you've seen it here, the best advice is "Don't feed the trolls".

      One creative solution I heard from Phil Greenspun is to simply let the trolls post away. If you find someone is trolling, simply mark their account (or IP address) with a troll flag in the database. With this flag, they can post all they want but they are the only ones who can see the content -- to everybody else, what they post doesn't even show up. This way, the trolls think that their stuff is visible but nobody ever replies or makes any comments, which makes for a very dissatisfying troll experience. Trolls want nothing more than to get attention and stir up a controversial discussion, or have adversarial matches where they try and defeat your banning methods. Hard drive space is cheap, and it's rather easy to filter results based on account information so that only certain people see it. I think it's one of the better ways to 'not feed the trolls'.
      • Something Awful forums do this, and it's nicknamed a "hellban". There have been folks who have gone weeks without realizing they were even banned, as they merrily, and gradually less merrily, posted away.
      • Someone mentioned that Something Awful does this. Fark does it too. It sounds great, but the problem is that it creates great distrust in your userbase. I've seen people shadowbanned for years who made a comment or two some moderator thought was offensive. By not knowing if you are shadow banned or not, it creates a sense of paranoia.

        My best solution in a blog like setting is to set up a simple yay or nay filter. If something is obviously spam or nothing but vitriol, then flag it. The default view settings
      • Do the hellban, and have automatic ( Liza, anyone ) reply mechanism in place for when they post. Then they will not be as able to tell from the lack of replies.

        AND, you could even reverse troll them with the replies!

  • riiiiiiight. (Score:3, Funny)

    by JVert ( 578547 ) <corganbillyNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:02AM (#10451309) Journal
    I'm SURE you'll find the answer here.
  • OK, since lineman.net seems to be down right now, I've mirrored the article on my blog. You can check it out here [collegechixors.com]. And as far as that filter list is concerned, I JUST started building it. I expect it to get bigger and bigger over time.

  • How did he know? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Galapas ( 155864 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:56AM (#10451946) Homepage Journal
    Full text of what I got:
    Dealing With Trolls in WordPress
    You are not authorized to access this page.

    Whatever he did works great, I didn't even get a chance to troll before I was denied access.

    -G
    • I edited the page with the HTML code for quotes, because drupal (the CMS for lineman.net) wasn't showing my quotes, but strange characters. All edits to articles has to be approved, and I guess lineman is busy right now. So head over to my blog [collegechixors.com] to read the article.
    • Apparently the blog is a telepathic entity, all I get is a blank page
  • I do not think it means what you think it means.

  • I was hoping for something more automatic than testing for trolls based on their words, then manually approving posts.

    I wonder how well some kind of bayasian auto-classification of comments would work in practise?

    I guess the majority of comments would be very small so there may not be enough to work with, but if these systems are mailing comments to the administrator already it would be fun to setup a troll/non-troll classification, and see how well it could learn.

    Just like spam/non-spam handling there w

  • Posting a link to your blog in a Slashdot article while saying you figured out how to avoid being trolled = you get trolled like a motherfucker.
  • http://b2evolution.net/ [b2evolution.net]

    The other fork from b2/cafelog, b2evolution has had this ability for a long time. They also have a simple migration utility for people who want to migrate from WordPress.

    See you over in b2evo land!

  • If we could only get rid of the ones under the bridge. And under the bed.

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