Dealing with Trolls.
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It seems I’ve acquired my very own pet troll. When a conversation (if it can be called that) I was having with him became increasingly pointless and offensive I informed him that I would no longer be authorising any of his comments. This is a step I very rarely take but when he continued to keep attempting to post insulting comments to my other commenters, I realised it was perfectly justified.
The question I want to ask, however, is — if I spam one of his attempted comments, given that he seems to be using dial-up/different accounts, will this save me the bother of having to delete him? Also, will I be running the risk of possibly blocking other potential commenters who may use similar words/phrases?
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This covers the main methods at your disposal:
Keyword blocking has its risks but IP blocking is fairly safe to use on a single blog. Note that you can specify separate keywords and addresses for moderation as well as for outright blocking.
Whatever you do, don’t feed him after midnight.
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If you’ve got a steady circle of commenters, you could put your comments on moderation – where once the admin accepts one comment from a recognized reader, no further moderation is done. I had to do this months ago cuz of out-of-control trolling. If you take this option, just go to one previous comment from each of your commenters, and approve it. Then from that point, it will automatically accept them. Any future people who you’re skeptical of, you can accept their comment. But what I do is delete something out of their email address they left (that’s what the system recognizes when you approve it). That way if they come again to troll, it still goes to moderation; cuz you changed the email address that they’re leaving. That’s how I handle it.
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I’ve only had one person demonstrate “troll” like behavior – but I think it was just because they were passionate about a particular point. Still, I did end up having to block their IP’s so that I could moderate their comments – not something I wanted to do.
I wouldn’t identify them as spam as that could cause errors with the akismet filter.
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Thanks for the information. I do have moderation in place, but only rarely find myself faced with having to refuse authorisation. I envisaged it getting worse — he seemed very obsessive and offensive — but, thankfully, for the time being at least he seems to have gone in search of greener pastures.
Nice to know that I have a few options available should he return.
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I had a Penguin who was out of control, and I just put his username in the Black Box so his comments were automatically deleted. It worked like a charm.
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Just recycle them with the edit tools.
Works ridiculously well with spammers and trolls.
LOL~
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