Got Trolls? Usenet-style killfile for lj comments

[dtm]

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:

• 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)

Comments

[janne.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Tried installing the script, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to mark somebody as a troll. I found a page under tools telling me I can add or remove URL's, but are those the URL's of trolls, or the pages to be checked for trolls, or isn't it relevant at all?

[janne.livejournal.com]

Double-hmm... I can see a kill/hide comment option on the comments here, when I came back to look at them. I don't see those on any of the syndicated links or communities on my friends list (which is where the trolls I'd like to nail are :), and only one one of the two other personal LJ's I checked. Might have something to do with which style they use, perhaps?

This only handles comments, not top-level posts.

[dtm]

This doesn't handle top-level posts, and so won't filter out your friends page. However, I'll admit that there may be quite a bit of fine-tuning left to do on the livejournal bit of the script - I pretty much stopped once it was working for the comments on my page and on ginmar's.

I'll look at your friends list and see what I can see.

The problem with syndicated feeds and communities is fixed

[dtm]

Found it!

That's what you get for being an early tester...

Anyway, the problem was that my script is (possibly excessively) paranoid about applying its comment-mangling mojo to anything that isn't a comments page, so it has an extra check that the url matches a comments page that it knows about before it does anything.

I fixed it by adding a pattern for community and syndicated feed pages (the url looks different than it does on the comment page of a regular user).

You'll have to install the script again, but that's as simple as clicking on the "this greasemonkey script" link above and saying "install". Greasemonkey overwrites scripts from the same source with the same name.

Re: The problem with syndicated feeds and communities is fixed

[janne.livejournal.com]

Quick response! I'll give it a spin :)

Re: The problem with syndicated feeds and communities is fixed

[janne.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, that worked. No more Jassa on my comics feeds, hooray =)