Please please ged rid of the trolls here!

You do realize the death of the IMDb boards wasn't caused by trolls. It was people who couldn't stop whining about trolls like third-graders running to the teacher. The admins were fed up. The only contact they had was with the whiners. They assumed nobody was enjoying the boards.

We are adults. Ignore trolls. They're only doing it to see who is weak-willed enough to respond. You can't "get rid of them." You just can't. The only thing you can control is yourself and how you respond. I spent 12 on the IMDb boards and barely noticed the trolls. They're beneath notice. They're little ankle-biters. Who cares.

The whiners got on my nerves, though. If this is going to be a board filled with people yelling "Teacher! He said a bad word!" "Teacher! She was mean to me!" "Teacher, he's a RACIST," I'm out of here. If people want to be asses, let them. We ARE grown ups, aren't we? Can't we handle public discussion without needing moderators? Because if we're going to start right off the bat with the weak-minded behavior that killed IMDb, we're going to exhaust this site owner before this gets going.

My advice to the site administrator: treat whiners like trolls and ignore them. The rest of us will be just fine moderating our own behavior.

I used IMDb for well over ten years. It was only in the last couple of years that I started to encounter being referred to as a "troll" - without exception by people that became cantankerous about my opinion toward films or television series that they liked being harsh. It's the only reason I don't sneer at conservatives the moment they whine about being put down for differing opinions - sadly often, it is a true fact of the internet in the post-2014 world. Near the end of IMDb's run I began to receive the "red text" warning about watching one's conduct, despite that that had never happened, and that I had never violated their terms of service. I felt quite bitter and irritated about it by the end, frankly.

This is not the case for all and there are indeed many trolls about, but "troll" has risen in prominence to being a pejorative used to write off opinions expressed with a bare modicum of tact, or even opinions that simply aren't agreeable to the beholder.

Please please DON'T "ged rid of the trolls", because that distinction is a very slippery slope when one is not dealing in the obvious, such as neo-Nazi rhetoric or the like. For merely audacious behaviour, I'm entirely capable of rolling my eyes and looking elsewhere. Save deletion and censorship for scam and spam.

I don't like trolls either but if these boards are anything like IMDB it will be impossible to control. There will just be too many forums. So I agree. Best thing to do is ignore them. I was at IMDB for 15 years. It actually started getting bad right around when Patrick Swayze died. Trolls hit his board really hard. IMDb stepped in and wiped most of the posts. Things never got better after that year. Just ignore or do what I do. Troll the trolls. Lol

"I don't like trolls either but if these boards are anything like IMDB it will be impossible to control. There will just be too many forums. So I agree. Best thing to do is ignore them. I was at IMDB for 15 years. It actually started getting bad right around when Patrick Swayze died. Trolls hit his board really hard. IMDb stepped in and wiped most of the posts. Things never got better after that year. Just ignore or do what I do. Troll the trolls. Lol"

Swayze died in 2009. Why do you think it started getting bad around that time? What changed on the internet?

Because when I think about it, it did seem to get worse around 2010-ish for some reason. This level of trolling wasn't around as much in 2003 or 2007.

Did I say anything about trolls on the IMDb?! I said get rid of them here, or create a feature so that we can put offending people on "ignore".

And I was on IMDb for 13 years. Only certain boards were infected, most were great.

There were a few trolls on every board. Some were absolutely choked with them, to the point where they had no one to talk to and nothing to talk about but each other, because everyone else evacuated.

It doesn't take much skill to separate legitimate posters (even the most opinionated of them) from trolls. Their posting habits are quite different. All you have to do is get an actual person to look at the histories of users they receive multiple complaints about. Which means you need enough mods on the site to do that without becoming overloaded. That's not nearly as daunting as it might seem though. A relative handful of trolls are responsible for huge numbers of postings, so each one you eliminate noticeably reduces the number of complaints you have to process going forward.

The problem really is manageable. IMDB just made no real effort in that regard. People could post the most vile hate-filled rants over and over again, and never get banned. Trolls would even taunt everyone else on the board, saying we'd never be rid of them no matter how much we complained, ha ha ha ha ha!!! And STILL nothing happened to them. Like I said, it doesn't take a genius to figure out who the trolls are. It always makes me laugh when people imply that culling the trolls is such a huuuuge impossible task, we might as well just give up and accept that we can't. Wait ... do you think maybe it's trolls who are telling us these things? Hmmm. Sneaky, sneaky.

It's gonna happen Lennon if it gets popular enough here. Nothing you can do but ignore it.

As for it getting bad around the time Swayze died. I'm not sure. But IMDB popularity was really picking up than and the trolls were all over his board at the time. He was big in the news at the time and thats where the trolls go. Whatever is the biggest story or movie. It took Swayze over a year to die and that's why the abuse lasted so long on his board. His brother was posting there as well and it upset it greatly. Unfortunately him being upset added to the trolls furvor. I hadn't seen anything like it on IMDb up until that time.