A Little Housecleaning: de-Trolling Neato

1. Justin
   September 23rd, 2008 at 12:52 am

   Ah good to hear! I think often the problem is one or two trolls show up to a website like this and use a bunch of different aliases. So then it looks like you are over-run with bad mouthing 12 year olds. But maybe I’m wrong, I can’t view the IP addresses.

2. Evil Pundit
   September 23rd, 2008 at 1:02 am

   I’m a bit sad that some of my comments were deleted. In my defence, I’d like to say that I only make political comments:

   (a) As a direct response to political comments previously posted by someone else;

   (b) As a response to explicitly political blog posts.

   I would prefer that Neatorama be apolitical. But, sadly, it seems this is not possible.

   In future, I will post political comments only on threads that are explicitly political, such as this one. I hope this will be acceptable.

3. EEM
   September 23rd, 2008 at 1:13 am

   Thanks…sometimes the comments get a little crazy. I come to this blog to get away from all the political garbage.

   It’s easy to see how this kind of commenting can get out of hand so it’s nice to see that hateful comments are being taken care of.

   If only trolls could just be ignored.

4. Alex
   September 23rd, 2008 at 2:36 am

   Sorry, Evil Pundit - I did my best to preserve the comments that had political view points (yours included) in this link. Even though your comments are response to someone else’s political comments, they’re still not in context to the post.

5. SiteSeer
   September 23rd, 2008 at 3:37 am

   Censorship is erasing valid speech which disagrees with your own. Deleting trollisms is just taking out the trash. Mixing valid speech with trolling remarks makes this distinction harder, but I’d rather you delete until the comment can be resubmitted without the taint. Is that too much to ask?

6. ted
   September 23rd, 2008 at 6:55 am

   Alex has the ability to filter, quash, edit, censor, or otherwise interfere with any comments he wants to. The reason he doesn’t, of course, is because people would go elsewhere. China gets away with it because they “own the store”.

   A certain amount of censorship is necessary - spam, excessive vulgarity, and other offensive or libellous items can be weeded out according to the desires of Neatorama and its audience.

   Hopefully, the filters won’t get too crazy - it’ll be almost as bad as the spammers and trolls.

7. Larfin Jackarse
   September 23rd, 2008 at 7:59 am

   @Evil Pundit
   Rather sad to see a troll self-justifying.

8. PK
   September 23rd, 2008 at 10:51 am

   I’d be happy to see this site free of any political agenda as well, unlike sites like BoingBoing. (OT: BoingBoing is ironic and disappointing in its own way that they advocate against censorship but they have their own post-deleting and de-vowelizing moderators.)

   I do not mind cleaning up of trolls - many blogs desperately need that scrubbing like a dirty suburban pub! The climate here is generally calm and nice, and that’s why I would read the posts on this site. Great job!

9. S
   September 23rd, 2008 at 1:00 pm

   There’s nothing wrong with political discussion, even if sometimes it gets out of hand. However, I do agree with the decision to delete vitriolic or off-topic comments. It seems stupid to click on a link with a video of a friendly deer and rabbit or something else that really shouldn’t spark any kind of argument and finding that within four comments it degenerated into a flame war about Palin.

10. Gail Pink
    September 23rd, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    Well, it’s hard to stop/control the conservative trolls since their army of venom-spewing delusional is so vast…

11. CheeseDuck
    September 23rd, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    Ive noticed that all of my comments have this “Oops, something in your comment triggered the blog engine to request a moderation. Don’t worry - someone will take a look at it manually soon! There’s no need to re-submit the comment.” I’m not a troll and I don’t go overboard on political conversations. So why is that always there? =S

12. Alex
    September 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    @CheeseDuck - it’s something in your link. We had an episode of kongregate spam in the past, so we filter it out. I’ve taken it off the filter for now.

    @ted - very, very few comments on Neatorama are censored. A bulk of those that do get quashed are silly comments like gibberish characters or “first first first” type comments.

    We used to run a “politeness” filter that quashes vulgar words but that was an exercise in futility. It turned out not to be necessary either. Not a lot of comments are nuked solely because of vulgarity.

    I’m hoping that the recent trolling activities will cease - but who knows. It is the Internet, and it is election season.

    @PK - thanks! I hope Neatorama continues to be a friendly place to hang out online.

13. Ali S.
    September 23rd, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    Ah! So that’s why I stumbled across the odd comment in the old posts. I was gone for a few days and wham! the trolls amass at the gates.

    Lets keep this place clean folks!

14. ted
    September 23rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Yes, Alex, I realize that very little is censored. I was pointing out that you certainly have the right to censor whatever you like. But, if you did actually censor a lot, your audience wouldn’t bother reading you anymore. It can be a fine line, but with obvious spam and trolling, I can imagine it’s not a difficult decision.

    I just didn’t agree with Siteseer’s definition of censor, as if “censoring” were always a bad thing.

15. Evil Pundit
    September 23rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm

    @Alex - You were right to remove the off-topic comments, of course. I’m sorry for contributing to them.

    However, it’s obvious that political passions on all sides are running high as the election approaches. Perhaps it might be useful to create an appropriate topic for discussion every now and then — or perhaps not. It depends on what you want your blog to be.

16. CheeseDuck
    September 23rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm

    @Alex

    Thanks for notifying me, I have now just removed that link from my name.

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