META - Anyone else having trouble with a ridiculous number of troll accounts?

Submitted by SoDak Blues on

This has really gotten out of hand. The last three days alone has seen RollaFatty, Too Busy, and a number of other super new accounts that are here for one reason alone: trolling the board and calling out specific board members. I know the mods have a really difficult time with all the content, but other than adding morons to the mod action sticky, not feeding them and downvoting the hell out of these idiots, is there anything that can be done behind the scenes to ban IP's, etc... It's getting out of hand. 

Instead of losing work productivity to football content, snark and humor, I am now forced to wade through this shit. Any thoughts from the smarter tech crowd. I miss my MGoBlog.

 

Arb lover

December 12th, 2017 at 4:23 PM ^

Maybe a different aspect here. I've been a long time reader and lifelong fan but only decided to sign up after the OSU game this year because there were so many trolls saying some very un-Michigan things. So I'm not saying trolls are good, but having a provocative conversation once in a while does help get people off the fence on whether they want to participate more on mgoblog. That being said, I have no desire to click on a thread about how good I look. 

I like the above suggestion but to add to it; I didn't have any problem registering using my umich.edu email. I know there are tons of good fans and people on this blog that don't have one for various reasons, but filtering new users by whether they have a umich.edu account might help. If you have one as a new user, 5 days 100 points to start a thread, without, 60 days 500 points or something. I wouldn't say that your troll level with umich accounts is going to be negligible, but probably a lot safer than [email protected].

Hill.FootballR…

December 12th, 2017 at 4:27 PM ^

I think this is a good idea, but I know a lot of people that wouldn't want to give away their phone number just to get an "annonymous" account. Also, as other have mentioned below, it's easy to get a fake cell phone number on the internet now.

Here is my proposal: Make it so that you can't post for the first 30 days. Then once able to post, if their point total goes to -50 in the next 90 days, they get automatically banned and their posts disappear.

I think this would greatly reduce the requirement for mods to monitor 24/7, and would allow us "the people" to ban people in a short time period for some of the ridiculously inappropriate/trolling posts that appear. I do think that people would need to be careful of just downvoting due to "Joined" date (you're a perfect example) and guessing that it's someones second account though .