Punish Bad Users With Drupal Misery 418
If you're sick of banning or deleting troublemakers on your Drupal website, you might want to check out Misery, the module designed to give trolls a taste of their own medicine. Creating a random length delay for a user, redirecting them to a random page, presenting them with a 404 error, and crashing their browser if they're using IE6 are just a few of the things you can make users endure with Misery. I'm still waiting patiently for a Punch In the Nose module, but this is a good start.
And here I thought... (Score:5, Funny)
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
Re:And here I thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
Yeah, me too. A couple of years ago, some clients wanted a drupal-based web site, and I thought it looked interesting, so I, uh, "volunteered" to learn to use it. I bought a couple of textbooks, and found online teaching sites. A month later, I'd produced nothing useful. I'd asked a good number of "How do you ...?" questions on the forum, and the people there were very nice -- but they never actually answered my questions. All sorts of things I tried didn't do at all what I expected, and often I couldn't figure out just what they did instead. Finally, the client was getting tired of saying "We need something soon", so I spent a week building their site by hand, mostly by writing a bunch of perl CGI programs that generated the site from their data. They liked it, started asking for more features, and they're still clients (though the site mostly runs itself now).
Since then, I've had occasion to advise others looking at drupal to "Don't bother." Or sometimes "You'll be sorry." And I've read a lot of similar comments from others, so I guess it hasn't gotten much better.
Drupal does have some good PR, though, and they're pretty good at impressing non-techie managers. And they might have some good stuff, if you can figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. I can't tell whether it's good or not, because I seem to be too dumb to understand how to make it work.
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Re:And here I thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Drupal is first and foremost a professional publisher's platform with no compromises or apology. Drupal upgrades between versions are something I'll choose not even to discuss; because the pros know what to do already. Developer's are supposed to learn how to handle the professional tools for the job; it can take years for the pros to do this, and often does.
There's advantages and disadvantages to everything, so why not embrace the advantages while trying to work past any (initial?) disadvantages?
One advantage Drupal offers as opposed to rolling your own is the security of a lot of eyeballs against common SQL injection attacks, which seems ultimately responsible for taking down HBGary and the probably the Sony PSN network too. Hey, the White House uses Drupal publicly, and internally to replace famously-inept emails systems, along with NASA, the congress, the Economist.com...
Also from the owners' point of view, the Drupal framework is going to be easier to support than your system if you're not around, (and you can sell that as a feature, now).
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Your points are very relevant about the roll your own vs. use a framework debate, but Drupal is not the only framework available.
What I would like to see is a comparison between Drupal, Rails, and Django. The problem is finding a way to compare those three without falling immediately into a flame war.
Re:And here I thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
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How long does it take to learn to develop SAP or Oracle business applications, for example? How much does such a job pay? Maybe 'relatively complex' environments have something going for them after all? I mean these things are in-place with their own markets for developers to engage in. (And books exist, while open-source code is actually a.v.a.i.l.a.b.l.e, and legal!) If one expects everything to be sugar-coated as simple as an iPhone GUI, one might expect to earn less per day as well. The converse is true
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Why don't you discuss it?
I would expect a "professional publisher's platform" to be able to handle upgrades between versions seamlessly, or very close to that (possibly tool-assisted migration path).
I would expect a hack someone threw together and grew into a monster to be a pain in the !@$# to upgrade between versions, if it were even possible without major rewrites.
Re:And here I thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
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It does take a different way of thinking but is nice once you have it working. I do some consulting work with it and it is one of the better platforms I've found to work on, but only after really learning the ins and outs of it.
It's not easy to learn those ins and outs, though. I went through several books before I found one I could learn out of (Pro Drupal Development, 2nd Ed. was the one I finally learned something from, but even it wasn't as complete as I really needed.)
Alternatively (Score:5, Funny)
If Misery isn't enough for you, you can try the module "Crime Against Humanity". It forces the trolls to admin a site that runs Drupal.
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Another easy way to randomly delay users, show them the wrong data, and return 404 errors under load is to build your site with one of those trendy Rails frameworks. Make sure to use MySQL with MyISAM "for speed" if you want even more inexplicable service outages.
A third implementation would be to redirect the trolls over to the version of the site hosted in "the cloud".
For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... (Score:2)
What code are they using to crash IE6?
Re:For the sake of satisfying my curiosity... (Score:5, Funny)
HTML code
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Almost any modern HTML + CSS page? :)
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White space.
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URL blocked by policy.
Well, I can't say that's surprising...
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Well... I successfully crashed IE7 with this:
function f(){document.body.innerHTML+="<div style='height:1px;width:1px;position:absolute;'></div>";window.setInterval("f();",1);}window.setInterval("f();",1);
(Well - it hasn't crashed, yet, but it's not responding, pegging the CPU and slowly ballooning in memory. I'm pretty sure it'll crash eventually.)
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Trolls (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Trolls (Score:5, Informative)
So that would be...
If you want to give your trolls the silent treatment try the Cave [drupal.org] module.
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Trolls usually equip themselves with multiple accounts, I think they'd figure that little goodie out rather quickly
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Re:Trolls (Score:4, Interesting)
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That would be way more hilarious heh!
"Trollspace": where Trolls troll Trolls
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They already have that. It's called USENET.
Re:Trolls (Score:5, Interesting)
you might as well just put all the troll flagged accounts into the same bubble, so they could see each other's posts, but they would all be invisible to everyone else.
That was seriously considered for an early MMORPG. Annoying players would be dumped into a dungeon level full of NPCs and other annoying players, where they could flame war and player kill as long as they wanted, without bothering anybody else. It wasn't done due to resource constraints, but it remains a good idea.
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Re:Trolls (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's a total success. We called it World of Warcraft.
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It can be done by IP.
Re:Trolls (Score:5, Funny)
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The Pam Jones Module (Score:2)
silently flag their account, allowing them to post and continue viewing the forums as normal, but everything they do is completely invisible.
That's the Graklaw Pan Jones Module...
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/groklaw-accused-of-censorship/7826 [zdnet.com]
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vBulletin has had this option for years (not including the fake replies, of course), called "Tachy Goes to Coventry".
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I feel like there should be a post above this, but I can just barely detect a faint vapor.
Shame, too, as I was hoping to read some good trollese.
Bad idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad idea.
All it will do is generate hundreds of bug reports.
And. It doesn't really address the problem. If 'Misery' can auto-magically detect trolling why not just auto-ban or auto-suspend and give an explanation?
That assumes of course that 'Misery' can detect trolling reliably -which I doubt- so realistically it's going to annoy 'normal' users, ie the ones your web site presumably wants to keep, who will just think your web site is badly written and buggy.
In short: it's a stupid idea and a stupid plugin.
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If 'Misery' can auto-magically detect trolling why not just auto-ban or auto-suspend and give an explanation?
The user will know that the account is dead and just create another one. If you can string them along for a while and they think that the site is broken maybe they'll just leave instead.
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Yeah because forum trolls often file bugs. And in fact most forums even have a place to file a bug report.
And why would it be doing detection. Instead of clicking "ban" you click "misery". Now said troll will be slowed down in their trolling for a little while instead of instantly creating a new user and continuing at full speed.
It's not an approach I think will be too useful, but it's not a completely stupid idea.
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Adding a fake bug report form... Good idea!
Wow, does slashdot use this? (Score:2, Funny)
Crashing IE6, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
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<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
at the start of the page - have fun
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Is there a way I can enable this, like, sitewide by default, punished user or not?
Easy. Put the following snippet in all your pages: <script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
A bit uncomfortable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Crashing a browser is actively and knowingly interfering with the users local software and could have unknown consequences, moreso if it manages to take their entire machine out.
Other than that, it's a nice and interesting way of messing with your online nemeses.
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It won't take out the machine. It just makes IE6 close. Personally this should be run on every webserver by default.
DailyKos (Score:4, Informative)
DailyKos has a better way to deal with Trolls. Enough downvotes and the system makes all their posts invisible to the rest of the users. The troll still sees them so he/she wouldn't know they're essentially locked out (at least not right away).
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It has to be better than what HuffingtonPost.com does. Basically, a rigidly very left group of admins screen posts that don't meet their accepted political opinions. I'm liberal, but I'm not liberal *enough* to even post there anymore. They do leave conservative posts up strangely. It's like they want to present their own view of what "liberal" is.
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Instead the collective socialist mentality at that cesspool beats down and oppresses opposing opinions every chance it gets.
Welcome to the Internet.
Re:DailyKos (Score:5, Insightful)
It's perfectly valid to be in favor of free speech, but not want to hear everything everybody has to say. I think that piece of shit preacher from Florida is perfectly within his rights to do whatever he wants to a book he owns, but I won't watch him do it.
If I called you an asshole, and you walked away, I could hardly claim you don't care about free speech since you're not listening to me any more. You've just decided you have better things to do with your time.
You can claim that somebody is not interested in challenging his own ideas if he ignores everything to the contrary (think birthers); but that's a separate issue. Denying somebody the right to speak in your house is not a First Amendment issue or a free speech issue: he can still speak, but he's not guaranteed an audience.
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Except there's more to the idea of free speech than the first amendment or the law: the idea of free speech is that good ideas are supposed to drive out bad ones, and that doesn't work if factual, well-argued comments are deleted for having an inconvenient viewpoint. Deleting trolls and flames is no problem, but as someone else pointed out it's often not the troll comments that get deleted - they may disrupt the discussion, but if anything the opposition helps strengthen the other commenters' belief.
The oth
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You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.
Yes, I do. For the same reason that, if you come to my house and start putting up political signs all over the lawn and walls, I'll remove them. If you persist, I may file charges.
Web sites aren't free (in the $ sense). It costs me money to run a web site, and part of the cost is disk space. If you and your buddies descend on my web site and start filling up my disks with garbage (as defined by me, of course), I'm going to remove it. I can't afford the unbounded disk space that all the political nut
Re:DailyKos (Score:4, Insightful)
You had me going right up to the end of your sentence.
"Goose stepping" ?!? DailyKos may not be your cup of tea, but they are pretty solidly in the middle of what is considered the "left" in the U.S., and would be considered "centrist" or even "center right" in Europe. The fact that you are making an obvious allusion of them to the NAZI Brownshirts, over them excercising a tiny amount of editorial control of what remains on their site, shows far more about you than it does about them.
Also, for your eidification, "Free Speech" means "freedom from government repression for expressing your opinion", not "freedom to deface other people's property with messages that they consider offensive". I also know, courtesy of FOX, that there have been offensive leftist things posted on that website by various anonymous flamers, which they have promptly removed.
The only "moron" here is the person who posted a Godwin troll while complaining about some website's anti-troll policy.
No wait - scratch that. The morons who upvoted you as "Insightful" are more to blame. At least you can type.
Harming your users (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, obviously something like this can be abused...
But if you look at the actual module you'll see that it is intended to combat trolls.
Not automated spambots... Not the well-behaved members of your community... But trolls. The folks who intentionally post garbage just to get a reaction.
Sure, banning trolls is the typical response. But it's also rather obvious when you've been banned, and somebody who is determined to troll your boards can simply create a new account. This module will hopefully dissua
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Also, if you take a look at the module itself you'll see that by default it will not crash IE6. That's simply an option that can be enabled if you're feeling particularly malicious.
You'll see if you look at this smallpox-infected blanket, that it is not flung into that village by default. It's merely an option for which I bear no moral responsibility at all.
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Harming your users doesn't seem to me a good idea at all. Adding more bad behavior to the Internet is unlikely to improve anyone's situation.
Can't say I agree. The more energy one has to use to be a turd, the less inclined they'll be to do it after a certain amount of time.
And crashing their browsers? That crosses an ethical line, in my opinion. What's next, infecting them with malware out of spite?
Normally I'd agree, but it shouldn't be possible to do that with any browser.
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The worst users are those that keep signing up under new names and continuing the harrassment, or those that exploit your 'anonymous' features and just keep it up. Rather than play whack-a-mole and inactivating their accounts to watch them come back like a cockroach, 'misery' gives them pain for their bad behavior.
Of course they will figure out what's on, and either leave or re-register, but the stupid and slow might think you're an ID10T admin, and give up on your stupid broken website. Which is also a g
Funny, but not useful (Score:2)
This is pretty funny in theory, but in practice, as others have noted, it's not really very professional or a good idea..
Better off just banning them, using CAPTCHA, etc.
Punish the Troll-Feeders? (Score:2)
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The primary problem with trolls is that they get fed. Other users MUST feed trolls - They're powerless to resist. You can scream DON'T FEED THE TROLLS at the top of your lungs yet time after time after time yet they'll still be fed, everywhere, all the time. If you could somehow figure out how to address the other users who feed the trolls, the trolls would eventually starve and die off. Of course, getting rid of spam would be easier than this, as it goes against human nature, but if it could be solved the troll problem would go away...
I know what ya mean my nigger...
slashpal (Score:2)
Re:their (Score:4, Funny)
Irregardless, your gay and I could care less.
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No, "crashing their browser if their using IE6".
wrong. (Score:2)
"browser if their using IE6" in the original post is incorrect. It should be 'they are'.
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I think AC was refering to this bit:
if their using IE6
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I think AC was refering to this bit:
if their using IE6
Heh. One of the features could be to randomly search and replace 'their' for "they're" and cause a 404 to come up when they try to reply to those posts.
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I would assume AC is complaining about "if their using IE6".
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So "if their using IE6" is correct in what dialect of English? Brain-dead retarded?
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It is if they're using IE6.
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I am no way endorsing this, BTW. I happen to like English as it is very much, but it does have a history of relatively rapid change. With the confluence of so many people learning ESL and the younger generation being less tolerant of complicated grammar, usage, and spelling than us older folks, I think a lot of those
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She is, do you have a point?
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If a user is bad enough to drive others away, getting rid of them is the strategy that maximizes the size of your userbase. Once you factor in the fact that users vary in level of quality, terminating the undesirables starts to look even more attractive.
For websites that are of the simple 1 user interacting with some interface/body of
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Sure there's a reason; it's called being an insufferable manchild. Plenty of Slashdot users should have firsthand experience with that one...
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But if you ban them they just clear cookies, change their IP, and register a new account.
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What may be better is to use the cave module, or Beehive's "worm mode".
If you ban a severe troll, they will run around creating new sock puppet accounts. However, if you turn on code that allows them to post, with nobody else ever seeing it, they will happily run around flaming people left and right... then get their hackles up because they see nobody responding. Finally, the troll puts up a "bah, you guys suck" notice and leaves for good.
Really dedicated trolls can get around bans [1]. The trick is to m
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One of my car hacking websites has this... It's called the troll bin. All the users that get marked as troll can post all they want but nobody but themselves or another troll see it. If you get a rep level above 20 (20 people liked your post) it appears visible to you and you can go and browse the troll bin for reading fun.
I have wasted many hours laughing at how the trolls get all pissed that nobody is responding, then another troll responds, and they troll each other. Every once in a while they figur
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That and I doubt that it will curve their behavior, they will just figure your site is just crappy. It reminds me a of the old SysOp fuction on the old BBS Software ( WWIV) that allowed you to disconnect a user and make it look like line noise. It was good in the aspect that you could kick them off without them being personally offended, but it made it look like your line wasn't high quality and often will not go back to your site.
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It was good in the aspect that you could kick them off without them being personally offended, but it made it look like your line wasn't high quality and often will not go back to your site.
Isn't that even better? That way trolls will just leave without trying to get back at you or other asshattery, and the good users won't see any disruption, so you probably wouldn't gain much of a reputation as an unreliable site. Is there a downside I'm missing?
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Or at some startup company that is trying to make a profit, but where the atmosphere is more fun and exciting than professional (and the pay is probably commensurate), this could be a way to let your admin blow off a little steam.
Just because it would never fly at your company doesn't mean that there are no situations wh
Re:their/they're (Score:5, Funny)
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Except, in theory we have these people called editors whose job it is to actually, you know, edit the submissions for some semblance of grammatical and spelling goodness.
In theory, these people even get paid for this task, which is intended to actually cause them to do it instead of blindly clicking.
But, hey, snark all you want ... why should Slashdot be any different from t
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Slash should totally highlight troublesome words in the editor view. The worst ones on the web are:
Loose / lose
There / their / they're
Definately (sic)
Its / it's
Lead / led
I've seen lots of 'loose' used for 'lose' especially. The iOS (helpfully) corrects 'its' to 'it's' every time, leading to more of these errors. I have no idea why people think 'lead' is the past tense of -uh- 'lead' nor why 'definately' is such a common mistake, but generally most people are pretty bad spellers, not to mention we have varyi
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And how could I forget 'to' / 'too'?
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I have no idea why people think 'lead' is the past tense of -uh- 'lead'
Probably because 'read' is the past tense of 'read'.
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Except, in theory we have these people called editors whose job it is to actually, you know, edit the submissions for some semblance of grammatical and spelling goodness.
Or the editors get paid extra to troll the users? ;)
After all more comments makes their stats look better and maybe generates more ad impressions.
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Didn't know ... didn't fix it ... didn't care ... same difference. The net effect is that the editor didn't edit, and one of the countless pedants on Slashdot pointed out that it was wrong.
Your account ID is high enough that you might not actually realize that pedantry and being a grammar-nazi is a sport around here. Pointing out s
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I think you've found your new sig. ;-)
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This isn't a 'posting', it's a headline.
It's on a major web site and it's supposed to have gone through an editor and/or screening process before we get to read it.
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You call that a sentence?
Who is glad? who are you helping? are you helping yourself?
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"crashing their browser if using IE6" is sufficient.
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Are used by or against people who go to LARP? (Live Action Role Playing)
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See the recent Slashdot re-design for an example.
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homonyms actually