#4. Start a Posse of Moderators, and Arm Them

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Right now if you have a blog or forum or anything else with open comments, and you don’t have a human moderator to watch it, you’re going to wind up with a wasteland. As soon as more than one troll shows up, they will feed off each other until everyone else is gone. You have to control them. And don’t start talking about free speech; the troll’s goal is to shut down speech, to either fill the channel with noise until no one can talk to each other, or to get everyone talking about him instead of the subject at hand. He’s a guy in a coffee shop screaming nonsense over a bullhorn.

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And it’s here where the marriage of creative software and human moderators can make all the difference. With things like…

Disenvoweling:

This is a bit of code that will suck all of the vowels out of a targeted post, so that this:

“What an unfunny piece of ****. Somebody should be fired for letting this guy write for the site.”

Becomes:

“Wht n nfnny pc f sht. Smbdy shld b frd fr lttng ths gy wrt fr th st.”

The theory is that it makes people slow down and try to parse what was being said and thus robs the post of its impact. Also it makes the troll look very special.

Karma:

Geek megaportal SlashDot was among the first to use this, a way of allowing the community to moderate itself. Registered users can vote every post up or down, and each user winds up with a karma “score” that is just the sum total of all the “up” votes minus the “down” ones they’ve ever gotten.

We use this in the Cracked forums (where each member’s karma score is visible to other members at all times). You can only vote once per day, so even a coordinated karma voting campaign couldn’t change a score faster than the rest of the community could correct it.

Yes, it works. Everyone claims they don’t care what their karma is, yet any time a person sees an unexplained drop, I get an email complaining about it. You just can’t ignore a number right next to your name that announces what the community thinks of you.

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But we’re still thinking small, on a site-by-site basis. After all, bumheads will simply migrate to places where security isn’t as tight. If this is an Internet-wide problem, we need to think big. But how?