Fighting Trolls - A proposal
I recently participated in a gathering of an on-line discussion forum. It seems that their biggest problem is trolls that post off-topic or insulting remarks.Since there is a fine trade-off between fighting trolls and maintaining a free and growing web-forum, the trolls keep appearing again and again.
Trolls need attention, so when their post is ignored and (finally) deleted, they move along to the next forum. Unfortunatly, sometimes they decide to stay and each post from an occasional visitor must be inspected before it is published. Moderating was found effective but is not practical in big forums.
Filtering out trolls could work, as long as they cannot change their ID. Email addresses are easy to switch and IP address can be changed using web-proxies. The last resort are computer IDs. Each time a visitor logs into the forum, a simple ActiveX (or Java Applet) can calculate a unique hardware ID and use it to filter out trolls.
posted by Itai Frenkel @ 12:57 PM
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