Ideas to help protect us from trolling...

[Heart of Sword]

I was thinking maybe a big sign that says "Evacuate" at the top of the screen. When trolls attack, a mod could activate it so that it would flash colorfully and everyone would get off the board.
------ Shoo-dono said that posting threads would just make the trolls post more, so making a sign would probably be the same, but at least the other people on the board (save the poor mods...) wouldn't see anything.

Another idea would be for the mods to kick everyone off the website until everything is cleaned up. (Can they do that, mewonders???)

[shooraijin]

We can, but usually once we know about a troll wave, we'll just deal with it. To ban them off this time took me about 30 seconds once I knew about it.

A site this size is very hard to patrol automatically. If we placed all new posters on an automatic restriction where all their posts had to be moderated, that would probably really sink membership -- there isn't always a mod on to approve posts, and people don't always understand the reason why they're being made to wait to see their posts. There are far more legitimate and well-behaved new members than there are bad ones.

The issue is more having constant surveillance, and that's really hard to accomplish.

[Ashley]

Plus, if we significantly change the way we operate, the trolls have already won. The average time it takes us to ban a troll is about what, 5, maybe 10 seconds? I don't think this is enough of a problem for us to really do anything drastic about it.

[Vyse]

But haven't they already changed the way you opperate? I mean you guys took down the welcome part for the newest user.

[Mithrandir]

Yeah. Our main goal here is to try and find a way to let real users be real users, and keep the site open for others. Shooby is right, and we're working on a few ideas that may help a bit.

The easiest way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. I'm not kidding. If you suspect someone is a troll, add them to your ignore list or just don't respond. They'll get bored and go away.

I was going to try and be delicate about this, but I don't really see any way. I think this is a very bad idea(TM), for the reasons above and a few other ones. The more frequently people keep posting these kinds of threads, the more more trolls will keep coming.

Like I said before, and other hinted at. Just ignore them. They're not worth MY time to write the code needed to do these kinds of things, and I think the other programmers here would say the same thing.