I think the past few days have proven that a determined troll can get through despite our best efforts. Why he's want to is a question best addressed by his mental health professional. Multiple IPs, multiple aliases, muliple spam strings — you just can't keep up with everything without devoting more time and effort to it than I have available. You can't keep one person out if you're not prepared to keep everyone out, and I don't want to do that.
So now we enter Phase II: I've added the Trolls and Spam category to the editor so that Boris and his clones can be assigned to their very own category, at the bottom of the page. I was going to call it "Potters' Field," that that falls too high in the alphabet. I've also added a "Killed" field for the editors to use, which will cause the post not to display. I've had that for a few days, but if you browse single articles you've seen that they still show up there. So now that's fixed, and the text will be replaced by a nice message that they've been consigned to perdition. If it's a troll, but it picks up witty and amusing comments before it can be dealt with, it doesn't have to be killed. If it's just trash, kill it. Having the troll postings retained will throw counts off here and there, but I'll fix them as I notice them — pretty minor tasks.
I'm going to consider the problem as solved. Yesterday we had 106 postings and over 600 comments, a new record. I'm going to get back to my project of splitting the Burg into Page 1 and Page 2, which I consider much more important than Boris and his hangups. |