Don't Troll On Me
by Mary Tsao

There are some people in this world we find annoying. There are others who we find distasteful. There are still others who we find repugnant.

Beyond that, there is the troll.

Jay Allen of The Daily Journey and Vox knows a little something about trolls.

"Trolls are as old as the internet. For those who are lucky enough to have never run across one, they are little people who seem to have nothing better to do than argue ceaselessly and illogically about the topic at hand. They will do anything to engage anyone in their abyss of words for it is the only attention they really ever receive. Because of this, trolls are usually very bitter and angry and have little self-respect."

In the Blogosphere, trolls tend to leave incendiary comments and often return to make sure they've wrought damage, adding additional comments like fuel to a fire. So what do you do if a troll stops by your blog? Do you out them or ignore them? I've seen mommybloggers deal with trolls in various ways:

Back in February, Melissa of Suburban Bliss had a particuarly offensive troll who left comments about the state of her marriage. Melissa publicly outed her and then debated on whether or not she should allow comments at all on her blog. She decided to allow comments from those with Typekey accounts and to have her husband screen them first:

"I've decided to follow the advice of some nice person and I'm changing my settings (which I wanted to do for a while but couldn't figure out. I'm very smart.) so that you have to have a Typekey account to comment (it takes literally two seconds to set up) and I'm having Logan confirm or delete comments.

So don't send along nasty comments because I won't be reading them. Perhaps someday I'll be able to read the ugly things without having a massive come apart but for now, I'm just not mature enough I suppose."

Elizabeth of Table for Five recently wrote about the death of her mother-in-law, who was an alcoholic and whose self-destructive behavior took its toll on the family. A troll left Elizabeth a comment and Elizabeth just couldn't leave it alone. Unable to let the troll know how she felt because the troll had left a phony email address, she posted her email to the troll on her blog:

If you read my When life gives you lemons post, you’ll find a comment from MissA in which she suggests that it is wrong of me to feel what I feel and that I didn’t care about my mother in law. I tried to send MissA an email discussing it with her, but surprise surprise-the I.P. address is spoofed and the email is fake. Something about knowing that I was writing to a stranger brought out some deep feelings, so I’m going to post the email I wrote here. You don’t have to read it, or comment on it, this is one of those posts that is just to get something off of one’s chest.

I recently wrote a post ranting about my day with two toddlers and not enough patience. Anonymous left a comment for me that called me on my shit and which I completely understood was valid feedback. I acknowledged her comment and moved on.

Not so fast! Other commenters (those who know me and who comment with their names) replied to her and a tiny war broke out in my comments section. I was both flattered and appalled.

But what I was confused about was my role as the blogger. How do I handle this person? I have no problem with somebody criticizing me or my writing, but when she started criticizing my friends... that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Melissa's troll apparently didn't realize that most bloggers have the ability to determine who is visiting their blogs. Elizabeth's troll left a comment with a false IP address. My troll left a comment without leaving her name. Of course, I know where she came from but I decided that it was an isolated incident and I chose to ignore her. I left her comments--I believe they are an important part of the dialogue that resulted from that post--however, if she visits again, maybe then I'll look into banning her IP address.

Is there an Internet protocol for dealing with trolls? What do you do?

  • Ban their IP address?
  • Blog about them in hopes that public humiliation (and the revealing of their IP address) will make them go away?
  • Ignore them and leave their comments?
  • Ignore them and delete their comments?
  • Attempt to play mediator in your comments section?
  • Write a post about it?

Help me, Internets. What are your experiences with--and how do you handle--trolls?
---

BlogHer Contributing Editor Mary Tsao also blogs at Mom Writes.

Image credit: funtasticnovelties.com

Submitted by Mary Tsao (view blog) on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 14:55

Comments

 

Make money off the spineless trolls and
donate it to charity!

Back in the days of "I Am Dr. Laura's Worst Nightmare", I used to get trolls-aplenty. A couple of times I would post their asshatted comments and have a fundraiser. These links explain it best:

From this entry:
We at 'I Am Dr. Laura's Worst Nightmare' uphold a tradition of pulling hate comments and emails we receive out into the open and plopping the stank onto its very own post. We find that exposing the ignorance of these little weenies to the World Wide Web is a satisfying pastime, not unlike shoving a shaving cream pie into Ann Coulter's face.

And...

From this post:
On the occasion of receiving this most ignominious Hate Mail #2, and to channel this ugly, negative energy into something constructive and peace loving, I made a donation this evening to The Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Good karma. Always a great remedy to the mosquito bite sting of nasty asshattery.

Grace Davis
State of Grace
BlogHer Contributing Editor
Member, Blogher 06 Advisory Board

Submitted by Grace Davis on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 14:21
 

Nice, Grace!

As always, a superb idea and a unique way to solve the problem in a distinctly Grace-like fashion. Hehehe. Love it.

Mary
BlogHer Contributing Editor, Mommy & Family
Mom Writes

Submitted by Mary Tsao on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 15:06
 

Ignore them, and they will go away.

Works for me, every single time. I ban IP's of spammers and trolls who are really malicious though. Oh and anyone specifically searching for child pR0n. That really pisses me off.

--
Troll Baby

Troll Baby Graphics

Submitted by Karen Rani on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 15:22
 

Ignore, ignore, ignore

The few times I've not been able to let it lie I have ALWAYS regretted it. As the saying goes: Don't wrestle with pigs; you just get all muddy and the pigs like it.

I've only had to ban a couple of IPs, and delete just a few comments. For the most part I just let it go. Or try to. I remember Grace making donations, though, and that's awesome. ;)

Mir

--
Mir from WCS
(BlogHer Mommy & Family contributing editor)

Personal: Woulda Coulda Shoulda

Having it all with less: Want Not

Submitted by Mir Kamin on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 15:46
 

Another View from Accross the Sea

First Mary I had to run over to make sure I hadn't left the offending anonymous comment :-} you never know.

I pretty much just ignore the trollers -- not that I get that many. A few telling me I'm an idiot because I don't go along with their pet quackery/delusion.

David Bogner had a troll Troll Hunting and Stay of Execution.

Liz Ditz
I Speak of Dreams
lizditz@gmail.com

Submitted by lizditz on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 15:54
 

More on David Bogner's troll story

Sorry -- had to change networks -- what I found captured my attention about David's post was the principled way he thought through the issues.

I do think people ought to come up with some blogging principles so that they can edit comments from some sort of thought-out stance -- not just reacting emotionally.

Liz Ditz
I Speak of Dreams
lizditz@gmail.com

Submitted by lizditz on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 16:09
 

I recently had a troll. I

I recently had a troll. I finally figured out her home address and her work address, as well as her phone number. If she comes back, I plan to out her.

If not, delete and ignore has worked in the past. This one was pretty irritating, though.

Submitted by Carmen S on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 21:13
 

Depends

On a different blog that I maintain, I'm all for banning and public outing. I posted the email address of the last troll I had so that my readers could berate her at their will. Why? Because her post was so insanely insensitive and lacked any amount of compassion that I had no energy to deal with it on my own. So I let my readers handle it.

On the family blog? I've deleted a rude comment or two. I've let a few stand. I'm all for insulting my writing when it sucks. But when you insult my family? Cat claws come out and the ban stick comes down.

Family Living; Hatfield Style
Jenna

Submitted by JennaHatfield on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 21:25
 

Is it dependent on whether you're a "public
figure" or not?

That is a good question; what to do.

One of the reasons I used to love reading Opinionistas was because of the crazy comments section. Even though some were quite critical of whatever she had to say that day, she left them in. Then the rest of her readership went nuts and it just got to be a big brawl, sometimes.

Now that I think about it, there weren't too many just total non-sequitar meany trolls. And, now that they came out of the woodwork with her "outing" herself, she has turned comments off completely.

So go figure. I've just come full-circle in my own comment. But it is an interesting topic, Mary!

Submitted by Krisco on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 23:38
 

Trolls thrive on attention

Not giving them attention makes them the most angry. We've had our share of trolls on mediagirl.org -- mostly "men's rights advocates". Their tactics would go along the lines of starting with seemingly reasonable dissent, usually quite simple. You reply, and they come back with more accusatory and challenging questions. You rebut their assertions and ask your own questions. They accuse you of not answering their questions (even if you have) and make more accusations and ask more questions. Now others are getting in the game. This is where trolls thrive. They love all this attention. They start mixing you all up, claiming that you said what someone else in fact said. Somewhere along the lines, they start calling you truly nasty names, and claiming their superior intelligence because you avoid their questions. And so on and on and on.

The upside of this is that your traffic goes way up. Nothing like a good conflict to gather the looky loos!

The downside is that after a while, you start to dread going to your blog. You wake up in the morning with a smile, looking forward to the day. And then you think about your blog, and you go, "Ugh, and now I have to see what that fucktard wrote now." And there goes your smile, and you have to find some way to put that smile back on the day.

It's exhausting.

When do the trolls win? When you keep engaging them. When you lose it and start raging right there on the screen. They got you then! They're pushing your buttons! This is what they live for!

The best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. If they don't go away, ban them. I had one rather persistent troll a few months ago who just would not go away. If I closed comments to just registered users, he would re-register under a different name, different email. (IP addresses can be spoofed, or changed just by rebooting the modem, so that is not an effective solution.)

Then I started marking the MRA troll comments with the spam filter. Bingo! Their posts started getting caught in the filter just as if they were spam. And the filter got better at it with each post so marked. They would post their comments and those would just go into moderation, while everyone else's comments would go up on the screen right away.

Now, this is easy if you have something like Drupal (which is what I have for mediagirl.org, though it's getting a bit old and I should probably get an upgrade done) because it has this great spam filter. And it works for MRA trolls because they always post the same old stuff, over and over, from the same anger points. They're as consistent as spammers that way.

But whatever tools you use to clean up your site, my suggestion is to let roaming trolls roam away. They only stick around if they get your hackles up. Otherwise it's just too boring for them. Don't give them the gratification.

--
media girl

Submitted by media girl on Wed, 07/12/2006 - 08:54
 

Down with trolls

I don't get many visitors to my blogs so I haven't had to deal with this situation yet but on the forums I've been on in the past, I've come in contact with some real doozies. I really think it depends on a lot of things. Your tolerance plus whether or not the post is actually trolling or just stating a very strong opinion.

Most blogs allow you to turn off comments for one post, therefore if you let a troll comment go through and your readers respond in an unhelpful way, then you can turn off comments with a brief explanation. I would say ignore them and only respond to input you think is valid.

Lexicon Indigo|Blogilepsy|SmutWriter

Submitted by Indigo Black on Mon, 07/17/2006 - 02:35