Moderation is the answer

daytrip00, the two ways you mentioned are the two we're considering.  Ignore Lists seems a lot easier for us to implement ASAP, but the way /. does it is intriguing as well.

Not to say we'll do exactly what you all say but we're interested in opinions on different ways to do it, which you prefer, etc

But the idea is to not need mods.  We've got all the power in the world we need (you Niners), so we're trying to figure out the best way to give the power to you to make this place great and keep it clean. 

Sven Groot wrote:

I don't like Ignore Lists.

Say user X is a troll, so I want to ignore him. What happens to a thread that he started, and other people reply to it? Do I not see the entire thread? Do I see orphaned replies to a thread starter post that doesn't exist?

And what is user X posts in an existing thread, and people reply to that? I'm left with a bunch of replies that make no sense because I can't see the post they're replying to.

Ignoring user X will only work as intended when everybody ignores user X and nobody replies to him. But if that were possible we wouldn't need ignore lists, then trolls would just go away because people wouldn't pay them any attention.

It's these exact same reasons why I've never used a killfile on usenet either. If we get ignore lists here, I'll likely not use them either (except maybe to get rid the occasional horrible spammer). Ignore Lists are not an end-all solution, you'd still need moderation.

Agreed, ignore lists are not the end all, but I think lots of the problems you've mentioned can be avoided.  If you notice on 10, the conversation is threaded.  What we would do is if you ignored a particular user that posted in that thread, nothing underneath their post would show up and that particular post would be small and grayed out (probably say something like "this post was ignored because XXX wrote it" or whatever).  Personally, I don't know why you'd want to see posts that were in reply of something a troll said.  I doubt it would be anything more than "we don't need your kind of crap around here" or something uneventful to encourage them to leave.  Maybe that's just me.  We're working on solutions for this problem and will keep you posted.

As for being to easy to sign up, it's only going to get easier.  Have you seen how easy it is to sign up on 10?    Duncan informed me today though that we'll be able to ban name patterns so they can't sign up under any related name.  That doesn't stop anyone from signing up, but agian the idea is to ignore trolls.  I doubt any of them will post 20 times without getting replies.

To me though, it doesn't seem like registering and banning is really what should be done.  Why not just give everyone a way to more automatically ignore someone?  If you ban a troll, they'll just register another account and while the suggested non-pop3 idea would help, it wouldn't fix everything.  There would still be trolls, while possibly making the registration process a bit more annoying for some people.  Ignore a troll and they have no purpose.  You know...kill the flame by taking away all the oxygen, blah, blah, blah.  Not sure how the rest of the team feels yet.  I'm sure we'll discuss it once we're all back.

LaBomba wrote:



don't feed the trolls, ignore them. But clearly that hasn't been happening, while putting in ignore lists, giving the end user power control over who they want to ignore is an option, it's not the best solution as Sven Groot pointed out.

Like Sven Groot pointed out?  Why don't you re-emphasize it for me, because I still don't see it.

Another_Darren wrote:



HumanCompiler wrote: To me though, it doesn't seem like registering and banning is really what should be done.  Why not just give everyone a way to more automatically ignore someone?  If you ban a troll, they'll just register another account and while the suggested non-pop3 idea would help, it wouldn't fix everything.  There would still be trolls, while possibly making the registration process a bit more annoying for some people.  Ignore a troll and they have no purpose.  You know...kill the flame by taking away all the oxygen, blah, blah, blah.  Not sure how the rest of the team feels yet.  I'm sure we'll discuss it once we're all back.

How about slowing the registration process down? Have a probabation period after registering beore you can post.  Or moderator activation for new users?  IP matches for registering an account, so if an IP address is used more than once in x days then new registration goes on hold for a mod to approve.

I agree the big part of the problem is if you didn't ban people like coding4 jesus and just ignored him, he will just do what he does now and create a new account to troll on.  How big before your ignore list gets out of hand?

Well, IP matching doesn't really do a whole lot since they're easy to spoof and ever changing anyway.  We could slow down the registration process, but I'd be frustrated as a new user to the site and wouldn't come back, so I don't think that's an option.  And anything that adds work for mods I don't think is a good idea either since we're already limited on time as it is.  Anything we can do to put power in your hands is GOOD!

Ignore list out of hand?  Who cares?...is what I would ask.  It's not something you really need to maintain, you just click on a user and click ignore, done.  We could also automagically ignore by a pattern, like if you ignored coding4jesus, then we could automatically ignore coding4jesus*.

Think of it this way.  When someone is banned, they instantly know they're out and so they do what every good troll does and sign up another account and start posting again.  If people just start ignoring them, they don't know when they're being blocked, so at what point will they sign up for another account?  That's a major reason why I think an ignore list is overall better (even though it's not perfect).

Sven Groot wrote:


How about this then: when someone is banned, they can still post, but their posts are only visible to themselves. That means they'd have to sign out to see that their posts aren't visible.

Another major problem with ignore lists is that a new visitor, who naturally has no ignore list setup, sees an incredibly poluted forum, filled with spam (which everybody is ignoring, but he/she doesn't know that), which wouldn't invite them to participate. They'd need to setup their own ignore list - separate the weat from the chaff, so to speak - before the forum is usable. Also, would ignore lists work for the lurkers that don't have an account?

Good points.  So then what about the idea of a global ignore list?  Once enough people have added a user to their ignore list (maybe 10? er...better...9!), they are removed from everybody's ignore list and added to the global ignore list.  That list is used for anonymous browsing of the site by default and by all users (so new users would already have those people ignored).  YOUR ignore list, would basically only be who pretty much only you have ignored.

This gives you all the power to pretty much ban people.  Except this is better than banning.  They can't really tell they're "banned", because they're just automatically ignored.

The other thing I like about it is that replying to an ignored user isn't possible.  Like right now, people shouldn't be replying to trolls.  It doesn't help.  This would just sort of help enforce that. 

Again, the ultimate would be a situation where you all can maintain trolls and we don't have to do anything.  I'm not saying that because we're lazy and don't care.  It's because one, we need to take advantage of how many people we have here and two because the less troll catching we have to do, the more code and videos we can get done for you guys and that's really why we're here.