Mind the troll

19 September 2006

Well, my broadband is back working – I’m slightly surprised, having read so much about Bulldog’s appalling customer service.

While I was gone, a momentous event happened for this site;

A milestone.

A joyous occasion.

I got my first troll!

He’s bounced around the latest set of iPod/Zune posts, posting rapid arguments about his hatred for all things Apple. There’s some real comedy gold in there, so it’s might be worth digging through the latest posts to check them out – in one, he says iTunes is just a rip off of RealPlayer, which actually made me laugh out loud!

It touches on some of the points that Tom Coates has been blogging about recently – namely that of ethical blogging, and how you deal with commentors. I have so far left all of the posts up, and responded to them as well (as it’s quite fun), baring a couple which were crude and very sweary which I replaced the text so that people could see a comment was there.

I think that, in general, if you’re going to allow comments on your site you should really try and censor them as little as possible – the ideal would be not at all, but there’s a harsh reality of comments that aren’t spam per se, but are comments that are purely puerile attacks or childish swearing.

There’s a lot to be said for forcing people to register before posting a comment – as that stops anonymous comments by proving you have a valid email address – but I think it adds one to many obstacles in the way of a potential comment poster. If you want comments, you don’t want to prevent people posting as they might have something interesting to say.

There’s also the option, which I’ve seen on a couple of blogs, of deleting any posts that have an obviously fake email address. While this sounds great in theory, it really boils down to censorship again – are you really going to delete an interesting comment with a false email address? What about a comment you disagree with?

I think we just have to tolerate stupid people on the internet – they’re not going to go away.

From: Articles

19 September 2006