How to keep trolls from ruining an excellent site.

We all know that some people cannot stand creativity and success, and they will do their utmost to ruin everyone else's good time. Someone got a bug under their skin and decided to ruin things for everyone. My young daughter has an account on this site, and I have to limit her interactivity while this Troll is about.
There is ONE THING and ONE THING only that will stop a Troll: Make it boring. If trolling this site becomes the most boring thing in the world, he/she will stop. We can all clearly see that their contributions are useless and pointless, but we still give them attention. If we no longer feed that need, they will go elsewhere for it.

Please Don't Feed the Trolls!

Bore them!! Give the troll no reason to bother us. Even the most sensical of comments gives the troll a reason to 'Be', and to continue posting drivel. Dan and the others can only spend so much time policing fools like this one, let's help make it easy by NOT feeding the trolls. :-)

Comments

[ilpug]

I love killing trolls. it is so satisfying. A word from the wise: NEVER ENTER AN ARGUMENT YOU CANNOT COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WIN.

[dergon]

Dey see me trollin' dey hatin.

[squirrelMLM]

XD "lol im feeding the trolls"

[corey_caffeine]

Amirite?

[laradioken]

I've left many sites because of trolls.

[James (pseudo-geek)]

what exactly is a troll?

[kqrpnb]

From the Urban Dictionary:

1. troll - One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument

[James (pseudo-geek)]

thanks.

[Dieffsta]

all i can say is that i agrree with everybody here...

[radiorental]

Actually, at first I was a little 'wtf?' and pissed but now I find it completely entertaining. The guy is a total nut job. I love the fact he's certain he's going to win the camera, you know.. for the comp that ended nearly two weeks ago (o; god bless him.

[kqrpnb]

Yeah, it is funny because he's silly, but when he got foul-mouthed it stopped being comical. I am a little concerned that he may take at least a T-shirt in the contest... are late entries allowed if they shine brightly enough? :-)

[radiorental]

I'm sure late entries are allowed but he's going to have to post details on the pertual motion machine before the instructables team take note. How many times has he re-posted.... wait.. we're talking about him... dammit!

[kqrpnb]

True, rats!

[jonface]

'It's' returned. :(

[alexdcd]

Many Thanks to the instructables administrator/s for removing 'Wolverine' from this awesome site. His Troll posts were really starting to get under my skin, and the good management of this site has inspired me to post my recent project on this site, as i have not had the inclination to do so in the past.

[spinach_dip]

It's more work for the people running the site, but they should hold the projects off the site after they've been submitted until they're improved by someone who works for the site. For bad comments al they can do is delete them after the fact, but they can use their .htaccess file to block the site to people who have trolled it.

[_soapy_]

I suggest using not the staff members, but a group of "previewers" who would rate and comment on the new projects before they were sent live. Once rated above a three out of ten, it gets allowed to be seen and commented on by non-previewers. Staff would then only need to review the lowest scores for deletion (or, indeed, leave them to be improved if willing is shown), and those that were flagged up by someone as naughty, rather than "trolling" through all of them.

[jaredforshey]

I really hate this idea! I'd much prefer to have to wade through some nonsensical submissions to get to the good stuff than to have a committe decide which ideas/projects are good enough to be seen. I've had several bursts of inspirations from half-formed project submissions that omitted all the real details. Information wants to be free!

[trebuchet03]

in the bug reports -- its been mentioned that they've been working on a rating system... So junk will be removed by the viewers who rate it poorly... It works well with other sites without the cost of approving everything that gets posted...

[Chaz-imus]

eh...so who's the troll?

[trebuchet03]

Some dude that is on his third account now... It was getting a several people (including me) a little angry because he was telling blatant lies and he posted a whole bunch of 1 line comments. Some of them were kinda insulting - but most did not catch because some of them were in Italian....

He's gettin better though- now he has a little bit of direction in his third account....

---

In general... yes, there's always a post that does not satisfy the average reader... but what this refers to is not related to those - asking questions brought responses that left the readers more confused...

[jonface]

Little angry? I only signed up so I could open my can of rage on him.

[jonface]

I opened a can of rage when I saw you know what post(s). I'll ignore them from now on . . . it's going to be hard though.

[lennyb]

as dan and drum303 say if a project is a bit sketchy asking questions will encourage the poster to clarfy, on every contribution ive made i managed to do what i thought was a reasonably thorough job but someone still sees details that i missed and asks for more info. im happy to give it (and most people are) after all the projects arent fire and forget we can update and change them easily. its a rare project that satisfies every reader but even the small sketchy ones are of value ( although there are exceptions im sure ie: dangerous,off topic,obscene, etc).

[latobada]

there should be something, more or less like, document the instructable with images, or with a substancial amout of text that will let some one know what to do, especially be cause most of us that are reading have no idea how to do some steps. if possible also document alot of steps. One thing that might be nice also is an estimate of total time spent on projects or total amount that it cost.

[drum303]

If you have a problem with any of the submissions, may i suggest you leave a comment as you did here, and request clarification from the submitter. I belive most active submitters on this site would be happy to clarify. (Isn't that the whole idea of Instructables?) Also, there is no reason why the original poster could not state how much time/money was spent on the project. If they do not, go ahead and ask!!

[dan]

yes, it's fine if a submission is not very clear to begin with. some people are better at building things than they are at explaining them! but then you can ask questions, and the poster can address the specific things that are not clear. that is all good stuff here on instructables.

[dan]

hi, thanks for bearing with us. we'll be putting up a new major release of the site in a couple weeks that among other things includes flagging for spam, a bit like craigslist and a bit like digg. for now just ignore the spam posts, we scan the site at least once a day so nothing hangs around too long. i can delete in about a minute what will take the spammer quite a bit longer to put up. it is too bad that some users must persist in this kind of behavior which makes the site unpleasant for everyone else, on the other hand all of us here at instructables have been pleasantly surprised at how *few* spammers there really are compared to the overall user population.

[trebuchet03]

Yeah... I am going to step down from it... my apologies. Thanks though:D

[kqrpnb]

No worries. :-D