How To Handle Troublemakers

This topic comes up a lot. How do you manage people causing problems in your community?

There are remarkable few options.

• Do nothing. There is a difference between causing friction and doing irreversible damage to the community. If they’re in the former, let it go. You’re not the opinion police.
• Kick and ban them. If they are doing real damage to the community, inciting hatred, planning terrorist atrocities, engaging in illegal activities or insulted your parents – boot them.
• Suspend them. You don’t have to kick people, just suspend them from posting for a few days. Do this often enough and they will either lose interest in the community altogether, or recant their past behaviour and work for the common good.
• Punish them. Every time they do something wrong, reduce their karma points, or prevent them from posting, reduce their post counts, change their profile picture or simply edit their messages to something funnier – or just delete them entirely.
• Reason with them. Not you, the community. Ask a few regular members what damage they believe Mr. X is doing and present quotes (anonymously) to the person. They might see the light of day.
• Sidetrack them. Put them in charge of incredible irrelevant projects, unimpressive forums or agree to let them voice their opinions in their own column/forum.
• Let the community decide. “Well beloved community, do you want this member to continue doing what s/he has been doing? Or should we kick him/her out?”
• Bribe them. If you stop doing {x}, I’ll give you your own forum, VIP status, extra karma points, a regular column.

Two more thoughts. (1) Be careful that the behaviour you don’t like and the behaviour the community doesn’t like align. (2) Just because the community doesn’t like one person’s behaviour doesn’t mean his behaviour is wrong.

Comments

[twitter.com/nostriluu]

Ahh, trolls? Usually these people have a point, but are ineffective at communicating it, so their style becomes aggressive.

Your measures are punitive. Here's a novel idea for many communities: try to understand, help and enable trolls. They probably do have something to say, which may not be the mainstream view but is still valid. You may not be ultimately successful, but your community will grow stronger and mature beyond grade school behavior.

As the Internet expands communities where people are treated as equally and honestly as possible will become more normal. Think of wikis where typically 'users' have about as much control as 'admins' to create and edit pages, categories, etc, or twitter where celebrities can talk in a more normal, less managed fashion.

There are already too many communities (typically forum based) populated with corporate apologists who take pleasure in shutting people down over ultimately reasonable or progressive issues. These communities become more fixed and exclusive and like an aging population, become smaller and die off. If you just want to do it for your job it's one thing, but to build an honest participatory future it's better to shoot for the horizon.