F1 Fanatic

@keithcollantine – Could we perhaps consider some way of reporting people who do not register with the blog? I’ve noticed that a lot of trolls don’t actually create an account, and without an account, there is no way for registered users to report them. It then falls to the moderators and admins to peruse every individual thread and post, and I know that a fair few are falling through the cracks simply because the process is too time-consuming. Take, for instance, the user Diogenes. He’s a serial troll who frequently enters discussions and belittles people who he disagrees with, following them through multiple threads, and he’ll often bring things up days or even weeks after the fact. But because he isn’t a registered user, there is no way to bring this to the moderators’ attention. I’m thick-skinned enough not to take his comments personally, but I’ve seen a few non-registered users who post, raise his ire, and (to the best of my knowledge) never return to the blog after he has tried to verbally disembowel them. He’s one of those Internet Warriors who think that people who don’t share his opinions deserve unrelenting criticism until they go away, trying to turn this corner of the internet into his own private little fiefdom where the only acceptable way of thinking is his way of thinking. I know he hasn’t got a chance of seeing that happen, but it doesn’t stop him from driving away people with a lot of potential to actually contribute to the blog, and nor does it stop him from feeling smugly self-satisfied when they leave. Diogenes is just one example – perhaps the most-prominent example – of several users who do this, and I suspect that there are a few registered users who have an unregistered account so that they can attack people they disagree with without using their regular account and avoid trouble with the moderators.

That’s okay. I was just using Diogenes as an example, because he is the most prominent among the trolls, and also because he had been active within the last hour of that post I made. I know there are several like him out there, hiding behind the anonymity of an unregistered account to attack other users. I was just hoping there might be some way to report posts made by unregistered users the way we can with regular users.

@chrisglew

Why are non-registered users allowed to post?

Experience has shown that people tend to try the site for a while before signing up. Forcing them to sign up to post their first comment would discourage people from joining the site at all.

For legal matters I’m equally capable of deleting comments from registered or unregistered users if needed (which so far hasn’t been the case!)

Finding the best way of encouraging an open debate in the comments yet avoiding flame wars, trolling and the rest remains a challenge and one I’m always keen to hear readers’ thoughts on. This article is an interesting read on the subject:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/16/most-comments-are-horrible-sites-look-for-ways-to-make-them-better.html

The section on The New York Times’s standards is particularly insightful and much of it applies here as you can see in the comment policy: stay on-topic, no personal insults, that sort of thing.

A good article. I particularly agree with the statement that, on the online community, you cannot have open democracy and high-quality discussions at the same time.

It’s obviously a complicated issue but I think that the website owners are often to blame for the fact that the comments sections on their sites have turned into trash cans. The people who run the sites often want to gain popularity but ain’t ready to work hard enough for that.

Unfortunately, the largest websites in my country have failed massively in creating a decent environment for online discussions, the situation is even worse than on YouTube.