Recognising and Dealing with Forum Trolls

Well said Sten46   the is no need to be a professionl writer to have your say any where

I agree, Sten, that there should be freedom of speech, freedom to express an opinion and indeed to have strong views. 

An entirely different matter is when a poster is abusive, demeaning and on the attack.    A site owner cannot be online 24/7 so may miss on abusive posts.  Some forums have a raft of moderators who may take turns moderating, in keeping with guidelines for the particular forum.  If posters behave in a considerate manner towards each other, while still expressing their opinion, strong or otherwise, then a forum should be almost self-moderating.

Trolls are the bane of the internet.  It is difficult to imagine what kind of mindset they have that compels them to invade forums(any forum will do as far as they are concerned, even if it is about knitting, water-colours, growing lettuces, or something equally inoffensive.

So the point is, Sten, why can't people be civilized towards each other, express their opinion, discuss, without name-calling.

Patricia

In the bottom right hand corner of every post, there is a link to report spam.  I used it to report a sock puppet appearance on another thread.  The post was deleted.  The moderators are unlikely to be able to read every post but it seems they do respond to complaints via the spam button.

There are many people with very strong views and will not concider any other view,  they cannot be ugly dolls. If we all agreed with one another what would be the point of the forum?. Maybe there are people that just like to be abusive. The pleasure they get is logging on to threads such as this. I think its now time we stopped giving them  the pleasure they are having reading what we are posting

Haydn:

I agree, people who express an opinion, strong or not, are entitled to do so, and are not, as you delightfully put it "ugly dolls" LOL.

It would indeed be boring if we all agreed with ech other.  Robust discussion is great.  Abuse is not great.   And you are right, there are people who are so disturbed that they like being abusive.

I don't think the abusive will get much pleasure from reading threads like this, where it is obvious that we are aware of the problem and are letting people know not to play their sad little games.