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There is a disruptive person who has been present on the site for months or years but flouts its rules. He posts nonsense and gets banned, sometimes for a year or more. He creates a new account and gets banned, either for low-quality posts or for “rule violations”. He creates a new account and gets banned. One of his accounts has a century-long ban. He has confessed/boasted (in a comment to me) to creating hundreds of accounts. Recently he has not even tried to “hide” by choosing a significantly different user name.

Certain obsessions and stylistic quirks make his posts easily recognizable. His posts attract downvotes like garbage attracts flies. He is a troll who exhibits no interest in actually learning physics and is often belligerent in comments when challenged. He also projects various of his disruptive behaviors onto other users.

When I report that he has established a new account, it sometimes takes many days for his latest account to be banned or deleted.

Is there no effective way to keep such ban-evaders from continuously disrupting the site? Other SE sites re-ban him considerably more quickly than Physics does.

Should I keep flagging posts that I am reasonably confident are from this person? Or should I just downvote and stop being bothered by the fact that bans — even for rule violations — are so ineffective?

(I refer to this person using male pronouns because I have reasons to believe he is in fact male.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Likely related: Account "temporarily suspended" network-wide for the next 10 years, and cannot chat for 3 centuries? $\endgroup$
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Mar 4 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ @PeterMortensen The person I’m referring is almost certainly not that person. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 4 at 20:14
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    $\begingroup$ Link some of the questions so we can see $\endgroup$
    – hft
    Commented Mar 4 at 20:40
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    $\begingroup$ @hft I don’t think that level of disclosure regarding another user would be considered appropriate by our moderators. If a moderator asks me to do so, I will. Fortunately, this person’s accounts and questions keep getting deleted (either by moderators, or by him, or by the garbage collector), so currently I could point to only one question. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 4 at 20:53
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    $\begingroup$ @hft I’m not trying to draw attention to one particular user. I want to understand why user bans are so ineffective. Is it because VPN use makes IP bans impossible? And I want to know whether I should just ignore ban violations, if there is nothing that can be done except whack-a-mole. But why have bans at all if they can be so easily evaded? $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 4 at 21:01
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    $\begingroup$ @hft It's not appropriate to abuse the edit function to briefly transmit private information. And Ghoster is correct that such information would be removed from this post if it were added; we almost never do user-specific callouts here on Physics Meta. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Mar 4 at 21:05
  • $\begingroup$ @hft The moderators have responded with “Helpful” to flags I’ve raised for multiple accounts that I have accused of ban evasion. (I don’t recall any being declined.) I believe that they have all been the same person, but I can’t prove it. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 4 at 21:32
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe if it's possible to somehow detect that user uses temporary account, for example some black-listed email domains then as per definition all temporary accounts could be blocked from the start without analyzing to whom it belongs. Maybe some deep neural network could be trained to detect temporary accounts if such blacklisted metadata is in moderate amounts and has enough features. $\endgroup$
    – Agnius Vasiliauskas
    Commented Mar 5 at 9:49
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    $\begingroup$ The Charcoal team chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11540/charcoal-hq track trolls, especially trolls that operate on multiple sites. They automatically detect comments & posts that have rude / abusive flags, and can add their own flags to speed up the removal of such material. They also accept manual reports of troll activity. $\endgroup$
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented Mar 6 at 11:34
  • $\begingroup$ Try having Charcoal blacklist their name so their posts can be found and deleted faster. Unless they already did so. $\endgroup$
    – CPlus
    Commented Mar 6 at 19:14
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    $\begingroup$ @user16217248 What name do you mean? The offender keeps creating accounts with new names. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 6 at 20:04
  • $\begingroup$ @Ghoster A reply to 'Recently he has not even tried to “hide” by choosing a significantly different user name.' But I am not sure how 'significantly' different the names are. If they are similar enough, they could be blacklisted. $\endgroup$
    – CPlus
    Commented Mar 6 at 20:12
  • $\begingroup$ @user16217248 Most of his user names have been quite different from each other. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 6 at 20:16
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    $\begingroup$ @user16217248 There are a small number of unwelcome users who are just as clever as the folks who run Charcoal and the folks who serve as moderators and the folks for whom upkeep of the Stack Exchange community is a paid obligation. When these individuals decide to bother us for a while, it's a real hassle across the entire SE network. They seem to occasionally have a great deal of free time. It's sort of like trying to win a battle of wills with a petulant child: the adult is at a disadvantage because the adult has other things to do, while the child's time is unencumbered. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Mar 7 at 16:32
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    $\begingroup$ how do you know it is the same user? $\endgroup$
    – Sidharth Ghoshal
    Commented Mar 17 at 17:15

1 Answer 1

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The lesson here is "don't feed the trolls"

This probably won't be something that can be solved easily or quickly, or maybe at all.

It's a fact that in wider society there are people who flout laws and bans by courts with staggering regularity. Some people just like causing trouble, for no useful reason.

However, there is a case for escalating this to the highest level. Perhaps some kind of ban can be made to work. Speaking as a technical person, technical people like a challenge. Perhaps someone on staff can devise a better mechanism to detect/deter this kind of nuisance. Perhaps legal steps can be taken to e.g. deny them the use of their VPN (if that's what they're doing).

But ultimately we may simply have to accept that some flies won't buzz off. Eventually, of course, they push their luck and annoy people who swat them.

What we should do, is not engage them. Just vote to close and down vote and move on. People like this want attention, take away their attention and they go away and move on.

But don't feed the trolls. Don't debate with them, or try to explain or waste your energy on them beyond the minimum required to close them down.

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  • $\begingroup$ I know not to feed trolls. I’m looking for guidance from moderators about whether to stop flagging accounts that are likely evading a ban. And I would like to understand why other SE sites are able to re-ban such accounts much faster. One questionable account received a year-long suspension for rule violations, from two other sites, only one day after being established. That account is still under consideration by our moderators. Perhaps other sites have sleuthing techniques that our moderators could use to stop ban evaders faster. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 6 at 0:08
  • $\begingroup$ @Ghoster I'm not saying you intend to feed trolls, but I've learned the hard way that trolls thrive of any attention. I don't quite understand the psychology of it, but they want attention and they don't seem to care what kind they get. $\endgroup$
    – StephenG - Help Ukraine
    Commented Mar 6 at 0:15
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    $\begingroup$ I started to write an answer about the perspective from the other side of the moderator diamond, but I'm just going to endorse this answer instead. I share @Ghoster's suspicion that there is mostly one troll in question here, and that they are a particular individual who has been unwelcome on the network for ages. Sometimes they get bored and go away for a while. The more boring their experience here, the more likely they are to go away again. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Mar 6 at 5:50
  • $\begingroup$ @rob Should I continue to flag his accounts for moderator attention or stop bothering? $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 6 at 5:58
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    $\begingroup$ @rob I would like to discuss the moderation team’s response to his Holocaust jokes yesterday in private with the team. Is there a way I can do that? $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Mar 6 at 6:08
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    $\begingroup$ @Ghoster Your flags are helpful. Please continue. But your engagement with the user in comments is probably counterproductive. As a rule, it's better to Flag It And Move On (FIAMO) than to loiter in comments. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Mar 6 at 6:09
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    $\begingroup$ @Ghoster I wasn't active yesterday and didn't see those "jokes." Let me see what the other mods think about a private chat — note that we all have different schedules. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Mar 6 at 6:11

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