Seriously, bans work. I know at least one forum which has kept trolls away for years with the mighty ban-hammer, and maintained consistent quality of posts by making chronic idiocy a ban-worthy offense.

From the post:

In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.

They've done the tech thing, but it's an arms race. I think the point of the "experiment" comment in the third to last paragraph is that the problem doesn't want to be fixed. The coping effort is doing more harm than good, idiots rule.

Well, having been on the receiving end of something I thought I'd share my experience. There are raving lunatic fans all around the place, regardless of what genre the artists are in.

During the campaign to get Rick Astley voted as Best Act Ever for last years MTV Europe Music Awards, I started receiving large volumes of hate mail from one or two of Astley's fans (I've never seen anything quite like it before or since... and I've seen some pretty angry emails).

I was also getting some quite vitriolic comments posted about me by these same fans on many blogs around the web (Thanks Google Alerts!)... these fans, I found out, just happened to be women in their mid 40's who have a "thing" for Astley.

Having spoken to several people close to Astley (I can't say who) they have mentioned who these people are and that they were "loonies" and could effectively be ignored.

So, I imagine Reznor would get more than his fair share and I feel for him, I really do (I experienced about 3 weeks of it, and that was 3 weeks too much) - raving lunatic fans are everywhere.

Anyway, back to the story at hand, I think Trent talking about verified forum profiles is great, but I think that you could take it one step further.

Some sort of centralised system for verified identities online with a simple API that people could plug into their forums/comment systems on blogs.

Only want verified people to comment on your blog - easy, same with forums? - easy

I think when you start removing the anonymous posting aspect of parts of the web, it becomes civil. That's why I never post anywhere anonymously, I self regulate and I find I don't troll - unfortunately I expect there is a significant contingent online that don't have the same self control and do cause problems for others.

I think right now is that we're seeing a tipping point from when trolling was an accepted fact of the web the experience that new users are experiencing as how to act given it's becoming more widespread, and those people are simply emulating that.

It's a problem that is just snowballing.

</rant>

This would not even be particularly hard; the infrastructure already exists in the form of SSL certificate issuance/verification.

PGP keysigning is supposed to accomplish the same thing but has never seemed to work as well in my experience. It's a lot easier to just pay $20 to Thawte or Verisign and send them copies of some identity documents than to chase down volunteers and get them to verify you. (Not because there's anything wrong with the volunteers, but I always feel like I'm imposing, in a way that I don't with Verisign.)

And if the cost component to SSL/X.509 is problematic, there's always CACert -- they have a fairly rigorous system for identity verification (at least on par with the commercial issuers), using either trusted third parties or a web-of-trust -- and they don't charge for it.

I think there are JS libraries around already for doing S/MIME signing in-browser; you could build that in to a comment form and just reject anything that wasn't signed with a trustworthy certificate bearing a real name (not "Thawte Freemail Member" or something similarly generic).

Of course you'd lose 99.9% of prospective contributors, but that's the case with any barrier to entry that removes anonymity. People aren't going to join something like that unless the content is really good.

No, nothing like that.

I did have the intention of writing some essays on the site (I really just registered the domain to have my name as a TLD and for the email) but I've been working on my startup, so really haven't made the time to write essays.

It's not really a priority right now, whereas the startup is.

Nice rant, and that line is particularly striking. You'd think the fans would be favoring such an award for Rick, given they were his fans. They were jealous some new groupies would get to him first, likely. But to be such strong fans for Rick 20 years later: indicates added lunancy. Sheesh, you got Rick Rolled and a half: why would you want Astley to receive such an award? I mean back in the day Rick's music was commercially successful, today it's scene style-wise as a caricature to be mocked. Bizarre to the max.

I'd say so, from the content of some of the emails, they were annoyed because they were his fans first and yet we managed to accomplish something in a short amount of time, 20 years after the fact.

I'm guessing these particular people were getting annoyed because they didn't get any recognition for being his fans. I particularly saw their posts on his official forums after he had won... Trying to take a lot of the credit for what really was achieved by nearly half a million people that we managed to get using the autovoting program during october of last year (that I could measure anyway).

It could be higher for all I know, although that being said, I do have the figures for how many votes he did get from MTV themselves and it was nothing short of substantial.