I’m in the process of building a community website of sorts, and it is likely to attract members from another networking website catering to the same niche. I’m a member of these other sites, and have observed a lot of trouble-making members who make a habit of violating the TOS (but the mods of those websites haven’t done anything to stop them). My concern is that these members may decide to create accounts on my website once it goes live.
Is it healthier to deny these trouble-makers a membership account right from the start? Or let them register, use the site, and hope they don’t bring the shenanigans with them? The other sites I’m referring to have lost a great deal of desirable members due to the trouble-makers, but I attribute that to bad moderation and judgement by the owning company. Naturally I’d want to make my site as appealing as possible, I’m just wrestling with the idea of censorship. It can be a double edged sword: ban some trouble makers to have a better community environment, but at the expense of giving the impression of a dictatorship or unfairness by taking behavior on other sites (which do not belong to me) into account.
Are there any community site managers here who have run into this problem?
If there was a way to stop trouble-makers signing up to a site, our lives would be a whole lot easier
The problem is that with effectively an infinite number of throw-away email addresses being available free, it’s difficult to be proactive about it. IP blocks is another possibility, but you’ve got far more cons than pros there. Your only real control is strict moderation. The main options there are reactively, where posts are made and then you delete any you don’t want, full moderation where every post has to be approved before it’s published, or a whitelist approach where some members can be whitelisted to have their posts auto-approved - either manually or if they hit a crtierion such as 100 posts - and others have to have every post manually approved.
Yeah I realize there’s no easy way around this. Luckily the troublemakers would register with the same usernames as the other sites- at least initially- since they’re interested in porting their social identity across sites (I’ve seen these members on several community sites employing the same username). I figured I could lock down the account and block the recorded IP if they do this, along with a 20 post whitelist. I’m unsure about having a larger whitelist post requirement; I might not have enough time to review all the posts for approval so I’ll probably add a “report to moderator” flag.
I’m on good terms with a moderator on one of the sites, but I doubt they would be willing to share the IP addresses of these members should I ask (legal complications).
I’m somewhat concerned about what banning these people would do for the word-of-mouth reputation, but I’ve noticed that these troublemakers chase away the members I’d want to keep. I’d like to think the quality of the members matters more than having a conflicted conscience on censorship, but I can’t help having some second thoughts.
