Fighting Blog "Trolls"

As we've made it abundantly clear, this whole blog project is brand new for all of us and we are learning new things about its advantages and drawbacks every day.

First, we became aware of the problem of "comment spam" and tried to tell you how to fight it here.

Now we are starting to experience a problem that is endemic to all online communities: "internet trolls."

What is an internet troll? Wikipedia defines it as "a person who posts inflammatory messages [on a discussion board or on a blog] intended to cause a disruption in discourse."

While we do not yet have an official policy statement of what does and does not constitute a "disruption," we'll say for now that gratuitous personal attacks, especially by commenters using aliases will be considered trollish behavior.

Unfortunately, we already have an example amongst the comments to this post. Now some may say that one of the commentors who identified himself honestly make some remarks that were a bit sharp, but that's no excuse for someone else to attack him using an alias. The whole point of a community communications network like this is that we are all responsible for our words. If a person who honestly identifies himself or herself writes something unfortunate in the heat of an argument, he or she will have to answer for it in the eyes of the rest of the community. This is a natural and oftentimes very educational part of the argumentation process.

But this cannot happen when someone hides behind an alias to take potshots. The alias destroys personal accountability and can have the effect of "poisoning the well" of the entire community. If you have something to say, be grownup enough to say it with your own identity and take responsibility for it.

We are still deciding on how to handle this kind of offense, but for now we're going to ask this community to police itself. If a trollish comment appears, label it as such and do not give it the dignity of a response. You can easily delete any comment on your blog by hitting the trashcan icon by the comment. Also, report it to me so that we can compile an "ignore and delete" list of usernames associated with trollish behavior.

The rallying cry of all online communities that have been beset by this is: "PLEASE DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!" In other words, don't allow them to drag down the discussion to petty sniping and personal attacks. No matter how much they hurt your feelings, you only encourage them by answering them in kind.

One great solution that they use over at DailyKos is to identify trolls and respond to them only by posting your favorite recipe. This goes a long way towards ruining their fun.

First name on the "ignore and delete" list:

"THEonlyONE"