Handling griefers
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
I opened up the session by noting that OpenStreetMap.org is growing by leaps and bounds, and I asked how we might head off the griefers before they get here.
- our rules are not the same as Wikipedia
- Wikipedia has a clear sense of what belongs and what does not.
- some people think that notability and neutral point of view are the only thing.
- everyone agrees that Wikipedia’s solution is not perfect.
- every solution needs to be resolved and needs to result in a rule ... “rules lawyering”.
- newbies don’t know the rules and feel rejected.
- don’t try to create an entire legal structure for your community.
- ref Ubuntu’s code of conduct ... spirit of rather than letter
- community within the community to actively foster goodwill and participation. Wikipedia seems to lack this. encourage people to enter this community
- call out faults privately rather than publicly
- dispute resolution is 1:1 in private .. but it doesn’t scale. how to resolve?
- if you scale by giving people power, how do you keep them from being corrupted.
- Suggestion: don’t give them that power for long.
- Suggestion: peer-to-peer communication, but sometimes peers will reject guidance from peers
- how do you enforce things in an online environment when people can just get another account? Who gets to be the bouncer and can that work?
- email troublemakers: full moderation is the solution to full persistance
- very bad when troublemakers involve management. chilling effect
- ham radio culture ignores trolls. MUST, MUST ignore them, because you can’t shut them up at all.
- don’t pathologize behavior. could be simply passionate and having trouble communicating it. don’t spend too much effort worrying about such a small minority of griefers.
- how do you deal with bad comments in a wide, diverse community?
- like flickr did with photos, perhaps create a gated community.
- what about just having a bad day? Not a problem; everyone has a bad day.
- sometimes management of disruptive people requires listening to them.
- some troublemakers just can’t communicate.
- sometimes very effective to call someone, or send them love (e.g. a gift).
- sometimes people need medication!
- sometimes you have troll fighters who find themselves unable to ignore the trolls.
- always use the first name when speaking to a trouble-maker. first, it means that you have access to it and some power, and second that you are speaking to them as an individual.
- Sometimes the community manager needs a timeout to be able to handle.
- meetup has a timeout feature ... built in to the mechanism. site managers decide a timeout is needed, they’re banned from main forums, and gotten a message.
- question: how often do people use dummy accounts? not often; people love their persona.
- have tried checking european id,
- but it reduces participation substantially.
- Escalating to law enforcement?
- Kirrily has had trouble with people doing scary things.
- Lefty has tried it, but not had much success. Not much money so the police and feds aren’t interested.
- is it worth doing it just as the community.
- ISPs may be more productive.
- LEO has the power to shut down an ISP, so ISP will give up a customer.
- Lefty has his own personal stalker.
- make sure you have logs of the activity and IP addresses; email addresses are not sufficient.
- perhaps there’s a scaling point where culture loses out and then rules and bureaucracy takes over.
