I love the ignore based algorithms, and "kibitzer brakes". Hopefully mine will be set at 100 per minute because I've been here a long time... ;-P

<sheweigzwang> made a great point, albeit in a different form than the one in which it was made before. In a sense this is OUR website, and the only PROVEN method for dealing with trolls is to completely and absolutely ignore them. It needs to be a community effort, and prolonged, without which I see no potential for resolving the situation.

Trolls feed on attention. We need to starve the troll. I and others have already done this, however there are some who consistently refuse to see reason and assume this proven troll to be the same reasonable person they themselves normally are. By that I mean that they continue to "debate" someone whose opinion is decidedly unchangeable, and give him the exact attention he craves and without which, eventually, he will leave.

Sorry, you are limited to 40 people in your ignore-list.>

This is what I'm talking about. At least with the system currently in place, this is inadequate.

I am beginning to consider using the ignore facility on those who persist in engaging with that übertroll.>

That is precisely why using ignore is not a sufficient solution. I use the ignore feature, but I still see lots of posts of people responding to the troll. I would need to ignore half the site to be able to enjoy following a tournament without seeing half a dozen quote-and-responses to the troll.

I agree with <Stonehenge>: CG needs another posting guideline - No repeated obnoxious behaviour / no trolling. If there are questionable cases, they can be given the benefit of the doubt, but there is absolutely no doubt about what's going on with the site's current disease.

I do not enjoy using this site nearly as much when it is inevitable that every time I come here, even using my ignore list liberally, I am bound to come across the troll. It is getting to the point where I am also unsure if I want to renew my membership when it expires. However, it is great to hear that chessgames is planning on taking action, which would certainly be sufficient for me to stay.

My gut feeling is that if troll accounts can be automatically shut down, for example with an ignore-count based approach, the users on this site will outlast the trolls. If troll accounts only last a couple days before being banned, I do not think the trolls will keep making new accounts indefinitely. After all, they need to make a new fake email address for every account, too. There are enough regular users who would keep identifying and ignoring the trolls to signal the system that it's time for a ban even if new handles do pop up regularly.

One thing to consider when implementing this system is that it shouldn't necessarily be time since account creation based, or trolls might make a bunch of accounts in advance and then not post with them for a month. I would suggest making it post count based, or to make it even more useful, based on post count on highly active pages.

One final idea: just make it simpler to ignore somebody!

At present, you need to click on their username and go to their profile, scroll down, and click ignore. If there were a small "ignore" button beneath every avatar/time stamp, I think more people would use the ignore list, possibly getting to critical mass for not feeding the trolls. (Clicking on it could take you to a confirmation page to avoid misclicks, but just drawing more attention to how easy it is to ignore somebody might work.)

Sometimes it just seems there are points which should be responded to. For example, today he claimed Anand had been "pampered" his entire career. I thought that was worth refuting, which took about two minutes.

What bothers me most is he makes it impossible to discuss real issues. Take the system for determining the world champion. Is it fair? Does it it give everybody an equal chance? Is it fair that most tournaments are invitationals? They aren't in other sports.

But any attempt to discuss those issues is immediately twisted into "Wesley is being denied his chance, Carlsen wins through favoritism." And any remark which even incidentally agrees with a small part of his argument is immediately distorted into a full-throated agreement with Glenn.

<Jim Bartle: <I am certainly one of the guilty parties, perhaps the most guilty, in respondng to this guy.>>

Yes, you are. :p

Truth is, I did have his three names on ignore last week, but I still saw all the ridiculous posts and they were dominating the conversations.

All right, say I suggest that it's not fair to the sport that Wijk, Zurich, Bilbao, etc. have a qualifying system similar to tennis or golf rather than just inviting who they wish. Is there the slightest possibility this could be discussed objectively? Not likely.

And what have I posted but my opinions...it's their unpopularity that causes all this hullabaloo and rucus, this is not a lawful basis for censure and punishment specially so without giving the aggrieved party the opportunity to be heard and stand trial.

The lawful grounds for dispensation of sanctions are the commission of violations of the observance of the posting guidelines, point them out and I would gladly offer my response and rebuttal. What you're doing is applying an iron hand against the person for a non existent and unsubstantiated offense when you should have addressed his posts instead.

I may disagree to what you say but I would defend with my life your right to say it- This is the norm in every civilized real or online community- a hallmark of democracy. A right so fundamental the community of nations would congregate and declare it in a document to preempt the resurgence of another human catastrophe.

First, on the topic of "upvote/downvote" posts, that's a different animal than what we're trying to do here. The problems are too numerous to go over here. The bottom line is, that we don't really need a system where individual *posts* are weighed by the crowd. We're really talking about people here, and not posts. If somebody posts ee cummings imitations to the Fischer page, you ignore them. It's not a question of rating each poem; if you didn't like their last 100 posts, you're not going to like the next one.

The "ignore" solution comes with its pros and cons. The sad fact is that only 20-30% of people use the ignore feature, the other 70-80% insist that it's useless because most people don't use it. And as long as they are a majority, they'll be right.

This idea might seek to fix that, to make the ignore feature have an extra kick to it.

Appaz wrote <This one, however, is a special case that will demand special actions.>

Maybe, but please hear me out. We've dealt with special case after special case for years, and usually it boils down to the same thing: somebody that drives everybody else up the wall, whether they are doing it intentionally or otherwise.

What if we had a general solution that actually applied itself very well to the specific problems we face today?

Check out this math. I have a factor that I'm computing for each poster, I call it the PITA score: "probability of initiating trolling activity."

Most users have a score of 0. New users, old users, 0 is pretty much expected.

Then a few dozen members with scores of 1 or 2. I don't think it should be a shame to fit into this category, but I won't mention any by name. If you're the type to have ruffled a few feathers in your time here, then you might have score like this. Don't sweat it.

When you have a score from 3-9 you must have been somewhat controversial. I see lots of people in that range who are no strangers to kibitzing probation, and that's no coincidence.

The teens are rare, and you can probably guess who might be in them. Tolengoy himself clocks in at 13.

But wait--what's this? Stop the presses! Here I see a user with a PITA score of 484! It's probably record-breaking to accumulate that many ignores in that few days. And he's not the only one, another is at 417. And two more, at 185 and 208.

And guess what--these are exactly the four accounts that everybody's been complaining about lately. (You could add a fifth, if you count the one that comes in at 92.)

There isn't really much from the teens up to the 92, then 185, 208, 417, and 484. That's a real easy statistical anomaly for a computer to spot.

Kibitzing brakes are already in place. Now the idea is to experiment with a rule that says "users with a high PITA factor suddenly have to cope with more severe kibitzing brakes." And how bad is "more severe kibitzing brakes"? That's up to me to decide. Two posts an hour? One posts every two hours? Two posts a day? I'll try to work something out that will not effect normal users in any way at all, but will force the problematic members to really think about every post they make.

So what's the endgame here for the troll? He's never completely banned from the site due to kibitzing brakes; he'll just be very limited in how often he can post. Perhaps in the worst case the user is limited to a few posts a day. Assuming he wants to continue trolling, he'll have to sit back and wait and compose a really obnoxious kibitz designed to ruffle as many feathers as possible. However, not many people will even read his post, because they've chosen to ignore him. Isn't that a neat closure to the problem?

There's also a possibility of positive social engineering here: maybe trolls will get less interaction, because people will be encouraged to ignore the troll, in order to "vote". People will finally use the ignore function, even if it's not to ignore the person, but just as a way to identify them as a site nuisance. Which has the wonderful side-effect of actually ignoring him while the scales weigh his fate.

Also a few final points:

<1> We'll simply have to remove the "40 people in your ignore-list" rule. There's no other way.

<2> If this experiment proves to be a bad idea we will change or revoke it immediately.

<3> I've already considered a way to smoothly handle the situation of people with multiple accounts who all ignore a single member.

<4> For the sake of security, we better count multiple 'votes' from the same IP as a single vote as well.

<5> This won't happen today. Well, probably not. But look for it very soon.

<6> This doesn't replace the normal Whistle function so please continue to use that as necessary.