What is the most effective way you've found to deal with one somewhat persistent troll?
My current attitude is to simply delete his posts (all of which are blatant violations of the board's rules) and ban the proxy he used (it's always a different proxy). However, I'm having trouble encouraging the other legit posters to ignore him and stop giving him attention. It's a war of attrition and having to delete his posts every day is becoming a bore.
I have this theoretical ban method that as far as i know has not been implemented anywhere and would require some programming.
Here is how it would work:
The banned user would see a slightly different board than the rest of the users, The banned user's version of your board would include his posts, but the normal version of the board, what everyone else sees, would not included them. To this unwanted participant it would appear that he is being ignored entirely, he wouldn't need to find another IP to post from, as it would appear that he is able to post. In theory he would eventually give up.
Some dickery with post numbers would be required for it to be entirely effective.
Just out of interest, whats the board?
>>2
That sounds like a pretty cool idea. I imagine it would be possible using two complete kareha installations: one that contains all the "legit" posts, and another that contains the "legit" posts plus the troll posts you would have deleted from the legit site.
When anyone posts, check if their IP is banned and if so, only send their post to the troll board. Otherwise send it to both sites. Use a php script or perhaps apache's mod_rewrite to send banned IP's to the troll board and everyone else to the legit one. Like you said, you'd have to dick with post number references in case someone quotes an earlier post so there would need to be some kind of a cross-reference database which could be as easy as <thread number>,<legit post-id>,<troll thread number>,<troll post-id>. The banned poster would still get his first post into the legit board, but it would certainly cut down on the number of Post deleted by moderator entries there if he turns out to be persistent.
FUND IT
I lack the coding skills to make that one happen. For now I'm going to implement an iqdb (http://iqdb.org) based banned image detector. I'll add an additional option to each post on the admin page "ban this image" which will add it to the local iqdb. On posting, the uploaded image will be checked in the local iqdb and the post will fail if a match above a specified threshold exists. That will stop image bombing where the image is the same, but they fucked with the file to give it a different hash.
Regarding your question about which board, I'd rather not draw more attention to it. I'll just describe it as a niche, anime series specific board where the mere suggestion of a relationship between some characters will ignite a retarded trollfest. As a result, that entire topic of discussion is banned.
you could also try issuing non permanent bans to the people who reply
>>2
I had the exact same idea! But the problem is that people will catch on, and then just unplug their router once they see no one responding to their posts. You could hide it from the general user base, but the truth has a way of sneaking out.
It's called a hellban. Some sites use it already, but you're unlikely to ever know.
ETI/LUElinks uses it. It's a fast as hell board (invite-only so that means trolls can come back without contributing shit or shelling out 80 bucks nowadays), and it works on some of the more persistent trolls. That said, on anonymous boards it might not work if it enters the common knowledge that hellbans exist; people will just start proxying as soon as they get absolutely no reaction.
Image hashes do work, but why not moderation then you definatly get the #TROL