October 2, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Having a comment function on a website has long been seen as a great way to enhance engagement with your viewers. Recently however, smaller sites with fewer personnel have struggled to deal with the downside of allowing anonymous comments. Namely, trolls.
A troll is a user who personally or profanely attacks an individual or group using a message board or is wilfully controversial in order to provoke a response. Often these users wish to start an argument or simply needle the regular commenters, safe in the anonymity of the internet.
The name troll can also refer to somebody who is trying to surreptitiously promote their site through a message board by posting links, regardless of whether their website is relevant to the discussion. This is a growing trend and can be seen, to some extent, across many popular message boards.
Numerous sites, including popular Boston blog, Universal Hub, have now forced users to register before leaving responses. This doesn’t stop the problem entirely, though it does throw up an extra boundary to people who just want to link to their own site. It also forces Trolls to take some degree of responsibility for their words, since they now have an account, which can be banned or, in some instances, messaged by the site administrators.
Other sites have become so annoyed with irrelevant or offensive content that they have simply discontinued comments altogether.
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