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Would it be possible to restrict access on a per-user basis? For example, if someone has given helpful answers in the Kindle forum, but keeps trolling in the Lounge, shut him out of the Lounge, either temporarily or permanently?
The reason people respond to trolls, by the way, is this: Right now in MobileRead there are 112 registered users and 709 guests. Nobody, at least nobody who thinks about it, expects to tell a troll anything. That's kind of the point of trolling; they'd say the sun was purple if it would get people wound up. Rather, people are talking to the lurkers -- 6x as many, in this case, as active users. If people leave a troll's statements unchallenged (especially if they're carefully couched to sound not too outrageous at first read) then that appears to be the consensus of forum users to outsiders, visitors, Google, and so on. People can't leave a statement they find abhorrent ("all ereaders should be burned") unanswered for that reason. It's a bad situation, and one trolls thrive on: on one hand, you don't want to feed the trolls, and thereby encourage them, but on the other hand, you don't want to leave the trolls unchallenged ... and thereby encourage them. The only thing in my experience that discourages trolling is early and active deletion of their posts and banning of their accounts, and that brings in the nasty, tangled, grotty hairball of defining exactly what is a troll, how you know they're a troll, what posts should be deleted, and who decides who is allowed on the forums and what they're allowed to say. There is no easy answer for the troll problem, which is exactly why there are so many, and such effective, trolls.
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