How do you deal with trolls? (11 posts)

  • In your blog comments, how do you deal with trolls? What’s your comment policy? What kind of bad comments do you answer, and what kind do you delete?

  • @lucasdarosa

    Great question Lucas! I have it set to moderation, and if the subject posted doesn’t deal directly with the content, I don’t allow it to post.

    If they can’t provide value and they are just spamming, no way am I going to give them access to my audience that I worked hard to build.

  • I agree with @donpurdum in the past I’ve used IP bans on certain blocks that kept spamming my site.  I don’t do that anymore basically because it’s a time suck though. 

  • @dakotaloca

    Jon, I did the same thing and learned the more I banned the IP addresses, the more that came from other IP Addresses.

    When I stopped doing that and just didn’t approve the post, within a month it ended. Kinda weird. Did you have that kind of experience?

  • @donpurdum  I still get 15 or so a month, but the time spent marking them spam in WP isn’t a big deal. 

  • Since both my blogs seem to be very popular in Russia, and since I don’t read Russian, Delete seems appropriate. But in general, I try to make some response to every comment. Turning it into something humorous often discourages trolls — I mean if you looked like a troll, would you want everyone to notice?

  • @lucasdarosa I moderate my comments. I think I’ve been lucky with only having a few trolls in three years. My basic philosophy with approving comments is if it doesn’t add value to the discussion, includes offensive language, or attacks someone personally, I doesn’t get approved. I’m ok with someone starting a debate or calling out something in the post they don’t agree with, but there’s a right and wrong way of doing so.

  • Live trolls (versus the bots that sneak past some screening software) desire one thing – attention.  If you engage with them, or your other visitors/commenters do, you give them attention.

    My solution, and the one I recommend to my clients, is moderate all posts.  That offers you the further advantage of being able to interact with good bloggers within their own submissions, i.e., add your response to them in THEIR posts, the publish them.  

  • due to spam, I had to turn on comment monitoring (typepad blog).   So I monitor comments so I can quickly and easily delete the spam.

    In regards to negative comments…I really haven’t received many.  But if it’s not offensive or have bad language, I’ve probably posted it and replied to it as well with a comment maybe better explaining what they had trouble with.

    Heather :D

  • @lucasdarosa Never forget it’s your blog, and you don’t – in the end – have to justify your decision to anyone. 

  • Thanks for all the answers! I agree with @doolin in some level: the blog is mine and it must work how I want it to. Anyone can make a blog, so, the users can write their unrespectful toughts in their own blogs.

    But I belive that is a good thing, to make a clear policy of how the user can interact with my blog. That’s why I’ll adopt some policies in my blogs, in 2012:

    - I’ll create a comment policy.- I’ll share my content with Creative Commons License.

    Don’t you think that is better to educate the readers, by showing them the rules you like?

    So, when I delete a comment, I can show to all my readers why I made that. And the Troll will know one thing: if he repeat his behavior, I’ll delete his comment again. So, he will think twice before comment again.

    And a tip: Facebook Comment System. My blog have between 200k and 300k visitors/month. It was a lot of trolls and spam. Since I started to use the FCS, I got zero Trolls, and only two spams in 6 months.


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