It's unfortunate that you have decided to take this step but this troll has not broken any of <chessgames.com> posting guidelines. Guidelines against spamming might be the closest thing, but <chessgames.com> has no prohibitions against posting silly things and looking stupid. Just consider him a nuisance and put him on your ignore list if he bothers you so much. At least that way you won't see his posts.

Myself, I think that his postings are so ludicrous as to be funny, and I actually look forward to them to see what dumb things he will say next. Trolls like this are typically very insecure people with nothing worthwhile to do with their lives and like to make silly statements to try provoke others to respond emotionally. Somehow they seem to think that this raises their status relative to others. If they only appreciated how silly they look and how everyone is laughing at them they might reconsider their posts.

I urge other premium members to likewise withhold their payments until cg.com show that they actually care for their premium members over some random hooligan.>

Couldn´t have said it better.

That's the point for me: it's not worth the money anymore, however small amount.

But you know the preferred, chosen, response by CG?

We cannot protect you against persistent trolls, any more than CNN can (not).

This was a part of an argument told to me in private by email, but the principle is clear, and the premise is fundamentally flawed, at best.

The admins should have the final say when a known poster tries to solicit a new one.

If the person is known to use them for nefarious reasons they should be prohibited from doing so.

And repeated attempts to do so should mean a permanent ban.

But in this case it's not an issue. As you said "it's just discredited garbage <repeated ad nauseam>".

The disrespectful spamming is the problem, not the trolling.

The last three handles of the troll has been known to most kibitzers for months now, so the conclusion is obvious: cg.com don't care.

They prefer clicks over the general reputation of GMs, organizers, chess in general and their own brand.

I will be renewing my membership whether you permanently ban this guy or not.

You wrote twice that "it's all about number of page views for cg.com" — that makes no sense. Having some babbling idiot drone on endlessly about his pet cause (or make-believe pet cause) doesn't give us more page views; and even if it did, do you think we get paid every time one of our pages load? It's an expense, and the tiny ads on our internal pages pay only for fraction of it. We would happily sacrifice "page views" if it meant creating a better user experience.

Another issue which is neither here-nor-there is "free speech." This isn't a political cause; Chessgames is simply intended to be a place where you can come discuss chess in an enriching and pleasant atmosphere. If something threatens that, then we have every right to do whatever we think best to protect it.

This is not a situation of us not caring and doing nothing, because we don't think that the quality of our discussion is important. This is a situation of us seeing exactly what you are seeing, and not knowing what do you.

If you were king of Chessgames for a day, what would you do?

Do you think we should delete nonsense messages? We already go to the Whistle page and delete a number of things daily. Do you think we should simply ban the obvious trolls, and when they sign-up again ban them swiftly again? We've taken that approach: it leads to a proliferation of pseudonyms and renders the ignore function useless.

(From time to time we get suggestions like "ban their IP address", but those tactics haven't worked in 5 years.)

Maybe you just think that we should do what we're already doing with more vigor, and if that's your position, then I can't disagree.

There are some new error messages that I doubt you or anybody who frequents this page has encountered, but I know from logfiles that some trolls have run into it. Look at this page: H Kokkoris vs Botvinnik, 1962. The user there might have wanted to make 1000 posts, but he ran into a special error message that we call "kibitzing brakes." There are now limits on the frequency that you can post; e.g. if you try to make 5 posts in 5 minutes, you'll be told to chill out for a while. These limits change from user to user based on length of time on site, and other secret metrics. (Although, premium status does not enter into it.) The main purpose is to discourage "machine-gun posting" and force people to spend more time composing what they write.

(Please don't go on a posting spree just to see the new error message. Incidentally, the "kibitzing brakes" does not apply to Chessforums. Also it doesn't apply to deleted posts, so feel free to fix your typos and delete your old posts as many times as needed.)

The consideration came up: the software pretty much knows who trolls are based on the sheer number of ignores that the account has, compared to its age. We don't even have to read the forums to know the people who are disliked; we know it to more precision than any member.

So the notion came up: What if the speed at which somebody can post is a direct consequence of how many people have you on ignore? Even good users are on a few ignore lists, anybody here over 5 years is probably on one or two just because somebody misclicked. However, when you see over 10 or 20 ignores on an account created last Wednesday, bells should go off.

Let's say that some member has a very odd style of James Joyce prose not to everybody's liking, and because of that has a big number of ignores. If somebody really can't stand the person, put him on ignore. I think that's fair enough!

The most obvious problem with this is that the person, once they realize that they've been penalized by the crowd, will want to create a fresh account and start over from the default. Then the math gets interesting: the fresh account could be able to post very frequently, for a little while, but if somebody is ignored by two or three people a day after they created their account, something fishy might be up. We don't want a system where every single ignore is like a little paper-cut that hurts the ignoree; we want a system where a certain threshold sets off alarms.

So this would mean that trolls would be able to post, albeit slowly. And if you don't even like the slow pace, you put them on ignore, which happily has the side-effect of slowing them down even more.

You have handled earlier trolls in very good way, <when necessary>, often by simply appealing to common sense and good manners (maybe after a little "cool down").

This one, however, is a special case that will demand special actions.

Please, everyone, use the ignore feature.

This is I believe the first time I encounter such a word being used. You learn something on CG every day :)

Just which troll exactly is everyone talking about? If it's "tolengoy", I have him on ignore for a long time and thus not even aware what drivel he posts, if any. Suggest you do the same.