Ever encountered someone who seems to visit your blog and puts comments to annoy you? Or maybe this person keeps on putting weird things on your shoutbox, just to give you a bad name or something? Hmmm. Looks like you have a troll there.
According to one of the definitions in the Urban Dictionary, this is a blog troll:
(n) -A depraved individual who sits in front of a computer all day and posts flames of an idiotic or pseudo-intellectual nature on public forums and private websites. Many of these people actually become emotional about what is said on the afore-said mediums and feel it is their duty to punish those who disagree with them. They too may pursue this object in an obsessive-compulsive manner.
Dealing with such people could be difficult. You could have just posted something about your day and there’s this blog troll who loves antagonizing you. Especially if you are some kind of blogging personality.
Actually, blog trolls might focus on giving you comments of an idiotic nature rather than pseudo intellectual stuff. Sometimes they just go on and on. So how do you deal with them?
So far, it seems as though there are not so many effective ways. You might as well give them a try.
- Banning the IP address wouldn’t really stop the person. There are ways to go around that if the person is knowledgeable when it comes to computers. Well, try this first. It might work in case he/she isn’t so tech savvy.
- Moderate the comments on your blog. Don’t let them show up at all until you approve them. Maybe your troll will go away if he/she sees that the comments won’t appear anyway.
- Ignore the troll. In case you have not opted to moderate the comments and they appear on your blog, ignore them. Replying to anything the troll would say would probably make things worse.
Confront the troll. How? Post a separate entry on your blog that directly talks about the troll or to the troll. That might cause some more fighting but sometimes, it’s worth it especially when the troll gets tired of it all.
[tags]trolls,blogs,internet[/tags]
Originally posted on August 26, 2006 @ 4:27 am
