One of the best ways to stop trolls in vB3

[jilly]

well, my love for vB just keeps growing - I like the feature to make additional usergroups, and then 'automatically' promote them after a certain point.

For example to help stop 'trolls', i.e. people that come by and want to just start posting crap or spam, there is an easy solution now. I created a usergroup for brand new members, and when anyone first registers, they go into this group. All posts by these group members are moderated, right now we have it set so the first 10 posts are moderated, and after 10 posts they get "autopromoted" into the 'new member' group, and then their posts are no longer moderated. We also don't let them have signatures, avatars, profile pictures, ect when in the brand new group. I've found with most spam or harrasser people, if they make it through the hassle of registering, then start making posts and find their posts don't appear, they get frustrated and leave. This allows us to stop hassle before it even starts, most of the time.

However, I think you have to weigh the inconvenience to new members with the value of stopping spam and trolls. For my group, they are a sensitive group and get really bothered by harassers or spam, so to us it's worth the hassle of having new people moderated for their first few posts, and we have enough mods on at different times during the day that they only have to wait a few hours before their posts appear, if even that. The number of posts needed before promoting them out of the newbie group could be shortened to 5 or even 1 or 2 if that might work better for your site. You can always adjust it back up if necessary.

I also have a group called "moderated members", and for any members that cause trouble, they get put into this group, so while they are being a problem, we can check each post before it goes up. Then after about 3 problem-free posts, we put them back into 'regular' status - however some people are just hotheads, and end up staying in the moderated group indefinitely. It's a good way to control your problem members, the ones that aren't bad enough to be banned, but aren't good enough to be allowed free reign.

 

[Ogden2k]

Good ideas there. I'll subscribe to this so I can remember to play with your ideas.

 

[The Sandman]

I agree - great ideas. I have a Usergroup called "Probation" which sounds a lot like your "Moderated Members" - works really well. I haven't tried moderating new members but with the promotion scheme you mention it is not a bad idea...

 

[jilly]

a couple additional things..

that I forgot in the first post: Don't allow brand new members the ability to send PM's - and don't post the info about the first X messages being moderated on the registration page, because then the "sneaky" troll can just go post 10 'blip' messages to get past the required number to get a post to show up.

 

[CJSIXER]

How big is your board?

I come over from a board called JeepsUnlimted.com. We have 30,000+ members about half of which are active. Your method sounds interesting and like it could work in many cases. I just can't imagine using it on the site I run becasue I register 25+ people a each morning and several more through out the day.

We have a very big problem with Trolls. We have tried just about everything to get them to leave and have found that the only way we could personally deal with them is to coexist. We had a earlier admin who tried to keep them out but nearly went crazy doing it. They actually got together and formed an organized trolling group and members went so far as to change ISPs just to get back in. Many of them know how to spoof IP addys and all sorts of annoying tactics.

Its a very inovative idea and I think you deserve a for the idea.....

 

[Traveler]

I also have a group called "moderated members", and for any members that cause trouble, they get put into this group, so while they are being a problem, we can check each post before it goes up. Then after about 3 problem-free posts, we put them back into 'regular' status - however some people are just hotheads, and end up staying in the moderated group indefinitely. It's a good way to control your problem members, the ones that aren't bad enough to be banned, but aren't good enough to be allowed free reign.

Another great idea thanks,, Traveler

 

[Hunter]

We had the problem with some people registering just to SPAM through the PM system. To combat this we made all users with under 5 posts not allowed to send PMs. Once they reach 5, they are automatically upgraded into another usergroup.

 

[jilly]

my board is smaller than yours..

it's about 5700 members, and about 5-10 new people register a day - however all of this is no work for me at all, everything is automatic - the registration is automatic, and their promotion through the usergroups is automatic - are you using vBulletin? If so, have you upgraded to 3 yet? If you have let me know and I'll post instructions on how to set it all up...

 

[CJSIXER]

it's about 5700 members, and about 5-10 new people register a day - however all of this is no work for me at all, everything is automatic - the registration is automatic, and their promotion through the usergroups is automatic - are you using vBulletin? If so, have you upgraded to 3 yet? If you have let me know and I'll post instructions on how to set it all up...

No we are not using 3 yet. My question is who is moderating the new users first how many ever posts? We generally have 500 people active at any given time. We already have a moderation staff that is 20-25 people strong and they are busy enough as is. To combat trolls on our board there are a couple of things we do. One fairly effective one is we do not give a user access to the Off Topic forum for the first 30 days. This is pretty much the only forum that the trolls frequent. Then roughly every couple of weeks we go in and delete any account that has a zero post count. This is fairly effective at getting rid of troll accounts but there are plenty of "lurkers" on the forums that lose their accounts as well.....

 

[Antiarc]

CJSIXER: You might be interested in our troll-curbing method. It's a custom hack job I did, but basically, members must be registered for 12 hours before they can post. I essentially just put a check in the permissions check to see if a user has been registered for more than 12 hours. If they have, then they get normal rights - otherwise, they get the regular message that a banned person would get. You wouldn't think this is a big deal, but it has cut down on trolling by MASSIVE amounts. We do nearly 4,000 posts a day and have to deal with only one or two trolls a month on average.

 

[jilly]

how many new users do you get a day?

are you getting 500 new members a day? If so then that would be a lot to moderate!! We only get about 10 or so new users a day so it does not take much time at all for the mods to keep up with them.

 

[CJSIXER]

CJSIXER: You might be interested in our troll-curbing method. It's a custom hack job I did, but basically, members must be registered for 12 hours before they can post. I essentially just put a check in the permissions check to see if a user has been registered for more than 12 hours. If they have, then they get normal rights - otherwise, they get the regular message that a banned person would get. You wouldn't think this is a big deal, but it has cut down on trolling by MASSIVE amounts. We do nearly 4,000 posts a day and have to deal with only one or two trolls a month on average.

That sounds kind of similar to our no Off Topic for a month. There is little to no trolling in our tech forums, there isn't a big enough audiance who will take the bait there after all. We don't often have new trolls but we have people who have set up shop on the site and have no intentions of leaving. One of the former admins of the site tried to ban all of the trolls and all it did was make them consolidate, form a group called the Bastard Army and troll twice as bad. There were a couple of people in this group who changed ISPs just to get back in and there are several in the group who are knowledgeable about spoofing IPs. The end result in our case by the next admin was to let all of the "army" have their original user names back, create a second Off Topic forum that we call the Wasteland and let everyone back in. I knew about him doing this because I was a mod at the time and I was very against it.

SOOO then eventually I became the admin and at this point there is a tentative peace. There have been a lot of users on the board who run bulletin boards or forums for their Jeep Clubs website who say that we should just start banning when they act up but it would be disasterous for the site. If I were to ban the whole group of them would mobilize so to speak and I would be back to square one with to little man power in the moderation staff to keep up. When the "army" was on "attack" they would all come on the board at one time and go into the various tech forums posting 100 or more threads with some of the most digusting pictures I have ever seen. SOOO you would end up deleting all the threads, banning the user names involved but since they used AOL or knew how to spoof IPs they could always get back in. Or at least a fair number of them could. I guess the lesson is that if people want to troll your boards and they have the determination there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop them.

The ideas that Antiarc and Jilly have presented would certainly help. I know that in addition to the OT1 restriction we have we also do not allow free email addresses to be used for registration purposes. That did help considerably. Once they are registered they can change it but that is the only way.

 

[Morning Radio]

Hey CJSIXER!
Glenn here. Glad to see you made it here. I was thinking about posting this URL in the Admin Roundtable forum at JU.

For the others, the method CJSIXER uses to prevent access to the Off Topic area does seem to work. It does seem to keep thee trolling down.
Glenn

 

[CJSIXER]

Hey CJSIXER!
Glenn here. Glad to see you made it here. I was thinking about posting this URL in the Admin Roundtable forum at JU.

For the others, the method CJSIXER uses to prevent access to the Off Topic area does seem to work. It does seem to keep thee trolling down.
Glenn

Hey Glenn! I got an invite from one of the admins on this site. I dont make it over here enough though!