Trolls in Your Backyard: Dealing with Trolls on Your Site

Well, thanks to recent events, here I am again with some tips on how to deal with trolls infesting your Blogger site. There are similar solutions for other blogging software, and I'm sure we can get some experts in to share.

Basically, we're going to go over some simple steps: comment moderation, site visit logger, and some utilities to track and ban trolls from your site.

Let's get this out of the way - yes, I do believe that everyone has the right to freedom of speech. This does not, however, confer upon me the obligation to listen, particularly to badly misspelled, capslocked, misogynistic threats.

I may also add that this is for your site - Daily Kos has a fine team of admins ready to assist you. However, if someone's harassing you at your site and here, this might help give the admins info that will help them get Darth Smacktard off your back and back to his mommy's basement where he belongs.

Dealing with trolls, if you subscribe to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory:

Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Dickwad

leads one to propose two methods of counterattack - deny the audience or deny the anonymity.

Because outing people is morally wrong and a bannable offense here, I'm going to concentrate on denying the audience - the very thing the "Hide" button for us Trusted Users does here.

Let's start with the easy part - comment moderation.

Comment moderation on Blogger is one way to keep the casual troll away from your site. All it does is ensure that comments aren't posted without you reading and approving them. Not only does this cut seriously down on comment spam, but most trolls move on when they realize they're not getting an audience.

Setting up a site counter will, with a little work and an eye on the logs, not only let you know what kind of traffic you are getting but will help you match the IP addresses of visitors with hateful or inflammatory comments. If you want to do more than comment moderation, this is the first tool to look into.

You can also preemptively ban repeat offenders. This post discusses means of obtaining your visitors' IP addresses - still not enough to identify them outright, but enough to prove a pattern of behavior and enough to share with other admins.

You can also use a service like this one to ban visitors by IP address, but I find logging and comment moderation to be enough.

This should be enough for the run-of-the-mill Blogger site, allowing you to have comments while keeping the trolls out of your backyard. If anyone out there has something similar to share with us for other blogging sites and methods, please feel free to expound in comments.

I hope this helps, I'd really, really hate to make this a series.