[thelist] I have a question (I'm a novice)

Simon Willison cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Fri Sep 5 14:32:51 CDT 2003


Hill, Don wrote:
> I participate in a message board for high school sports and academics where
> we are constantly bombarded by offensive garbage from one particular user
> (who uses MANY aliases). He as also begun to clog a contest site run by one
> of the board participant with hundreds of bogus entries. This guy lives to
> make other, legitimate people on the board miserable. We are trying to find
> a way to block his posts, but mainly block his submissions to the contest
> site. The contest site has a space for entering an email address and he
> keeps entering new, bogus ones. When he submits, we know that Bellsouth is
> his ISP, but, since they use dynamic IP addresses, we cant block a
> particular one and hope to have success. Any advice on either find out who
> this guy is OR permanently blocking him would be MOST appreciated. 

People like this thrive on the attention they get through causing 
mischief. In my experience (having helped to administrate a forum of 
20,000+ rabid gamers a few years ago) the best way to deal with this 
kind of problem is to have a large group of trusted moderators with the 
ability to delete posts and ban user accounts. The ability to "delete 
all posts by this user" is handy as well. If you make sure you have 
enough moderators that one of them is almost always online, you can ban 
him and delete all of his posts pretty much the moment he registers a 
new account. Keep on doing this until he gets bored and finds somewhere 
else to get his kicks.

The essential thing to remember is that everything has to be done 
quietly. there should be no threads about him or his actions, and no 
contact should be made with him. Remember, attention is what he wants. 
Just silently delete any damage he causes and wait it out.

Additionally, a well written complaint to his ISP complete with well 
documetned evidence of his behaviour could help, but don't hold your breath.

Hope that helps,

Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/




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