Trolls, and how to deal with them - Chess Forums

ChessNerd49

Sep 14, 2022

0

#1

This site has a lot of trolls and bots. No questions about that. However, a common trend that I have noticed is that people get really flared up and upset by these troll and bot accounts. This reaction is what the trolls want to start off with, and providing it doesn’t help (multiple people have been muted for using profanity against trolls like Gorba).

So, I have a suggestion. When upset by a troll, remember that they want a reaction and they want to anger you. So just stay calm, don’t post about them and don’t react to them in any way (unless of course, you are contacting staff about said troll). Without reaction the trolls will get bored and hopefully stop trolling. If this doesn’t work still remain calm because in the end, they are wasting their own time trying to annoy random people on the internet. If you don’t react they are at loss, not you. I also recommend a strategy conceived by the Anti-troll federation which is BRI (block, report and ignore) which is an effective counter to trolls. If these methods are employed we are striking back at the trolls, not them at us.

Also a quick suggestion for staff and management. These trolls come up because of lack of security such as TFA (two-factor authentication), which despite disliked is helpful. However, even if this isn’t employed at least make it so that you have to actually enter the email password or get a code sent to email so that trolls will have a harder time crating more bot accounts.

Overall, these are methods I believe will work against trolls (mainly BRI from our end and tighter security from chess,com’s end).