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Got Trolls? Usenet-style killfile for lj comments
In many ways, people often use blogs in ways similar to what usenet was used for back in the day. That is to say, some of the common behavior patterns appear to have shown up again in blog comment threads that used to show up in usenet.
Specifically, I'm talking about trolls - people who show up in a comment thread to derail the discussion, and do so again and again and again. Examples might include someone who shows up in the comment threads of a blog discussing recent work in microbiology to argue yet again for Intelligent Design theory to be taught in the schools, or someone who shows up repeatedly on a feminist-oreinted blog to snipe about how a woman who is raped after voluntarily consuming alcohol deserves what happened to her.
Trolls are not necessarily bad people, (though some probably are) but they are behaving obnoxiously in context. In usenet days, there was something known as a "killfile" which would cause your news reader to simply not display posts from users you didn't like for one reason or anthoer. Wouldn't it be nice if you, the blog reader, could simply mark certain commentors as annoying, and automatically have their blog comments hidden when you looked at your favorite blog's comments page?
Well now you can
That is, you can if you are using Firefox to browse the web and feel like installing a few things. First off, go install the latest version of greasemonkey. Then, go install this greasemonkey script. This provides the ability to ignore people on some weblogs where I wanted that ability. So far, it covers:
It's pretty easy to add a new blog at this point, assuming that the HTML around comments is well structured, so expect the list of supported blogs to grow. Among other things, I intend to add support for comments hosted at haloscan.com (which covers several big blogs, such as Eschaton and Digby's blog) by the time the weekend is over.
Specifically, I'm talking about trolls - people who show up in a comment thread to derail the discussion, and do so again and again and again. Examples might include someone who shows up in the comment threads of a blog discussing recent work in microbiology to argue yet again for Intelligent Design theory to be taught in the schools, or someone who shows up repeatedly on a feminist-oreinted blog to snipe about how a woman who is raped after voluntarily consuming alcohol deserves what happened to her.
Trolls are not necessarily bad people, (though some probably are) but they are behaving obnoxiously in context. In usenet days, there was something known as a "killfile" which would cause your news reader to simply not display posts from users you didn't like for one reason or anthoer. Wouldn't it be nice if you, the blog reader, could simply mark certain commentors as annoying, and automatically have their blog comments hidden when you looked at your favorite blog's comments page?
Well now you can
That is, you can if you are using Firefox to browse the web and feel like installing a few things. First off, go install the latest version of greasemonkey. Then, go install this greasemonkey script. This provides the ability to ignore people on some weblogs where I wanted that ability. So far, it covers:
- livejournal, though I haven't tested all the obscure different styles available there yet.
- pharyngula, and other blogs hosted on scienceblogs.com
- slacktivist, and other blogs on typepad.com
- The Panda's Thumb
- Alas, A Blog
- Feministe
It's pretty easy to add a new blog at this point, assuming that the HTML around comments is well structured, so expect the list of supported blogs to grow. Among other things, I intend to add support for comments hosted at haloscan.com (which covers several big blogs, such as Eschaton and Digby's blog) by the time the weekend is over.
Update: Haloscan-based comments are now handled, as are livejournal community and syndicated feed pages. (Which were only excluded because of a bug before)
Update again: Pandagon is now covered and there is experimental support for killfiling people from your livejournal friendslist (e.g. if you like to read a community except for one particular poster). Note that the friendslist support is disabled by default; to enable it you'll have to edit the script to remove the comment markers inside the variable "scenariolist" from the beginning of the line that says "ljfriendsScenario". (You can edit installed scripts from the "Tools-Manage User Scripts..." menu)
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Well, yeah, if there's options to choose from
This script is more for those cases when the moderator/owner of the blog is too lax on certain types of trolls for the taste of the reader; e.g. I saw it claimed about a month ago on one of the feminist blogs I read occasinally (feministe? Pandagon? I can't remember) that the blogs of certain generally pro-feminist men (Ampersand and hugoboy, I think) no longer felt like safe places to comment because the owners of those blogs were not banning blatant anti-feminist men.
I was inspired to create this script because someone created one for pharyngula, and it was greeted with great cheer, and many requests that it be extended to Panda's Thumb - P Z Myers may enjoy watching silly creationists arrive with their arguments again and again, but several of the commentors clearly wished to avoid the whole thing. (Although the existence of that script did inspire me to learn greasemonkey and to create my script, there's no code shared)
Re: Well, yeah, if there's options to choose from