In an online community, "trolls" are people who intentionally start fights with other users by provoking them with off-topic, incendiary, or divisive content. Their goal is to purposely upset users and derail the conversation.
As you can imagine, you don't want Trolls infesting your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community. With this in mind, the Troll Management addon was created to prevent this from happening. When enabled, this feature allows Admins and Moderators to mark users as Trolls.
What does flagging a user as a Troll do?
- Users marked as Trolls are given no indication of this; as far as they know, nothing has changed in their account or in their ability to participate.
- While Trolls can still post in your Vanilla community, their posts are invisible to other users.
- Only Admins and Moderators can see content posted by Trolls.
- A red "Troll" label displays on the Troll user's profile page. This label is only visible to Admins and Moderators.
The central idea behind this moderation tool is that if everyone stops responding to a Troll's offensive and inflammatory comments (because their content is invisible), then eventually the Troll will become bored and leave your Vanilla community on their own. Remember, their ultimate goal is to illicit emotional responses from other users; when this doesn't happen, they'll look elsewhere.
Enable the Troll Management addon
The Troll Management addon must be enabled for this feature to be available in your Vanilla community.
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Addons > Addons.
- Click the Troll Management toggle to enable it.
Trolls and shared accounts
The Troll Management addon provides an additional benefit called Fingerprint checks, which registers and displays all of a user's accounts on their profile (i.e., shared accounts).
- This is especially helpful regarding Trolls because it can help you identify when the same user is leveraging multiple accounts from the same device in a ploy to work around their Troll status.
📝 NOTE: There is a limitation with this feature: these shared accounts are determined by cookie, not IP, so it is possible to get around it.
Enable Fingerprint checks
- On the Dashboard > Settings > Addons > Addons page, click the settings button next to the Troll Management addon.
- Click the toggle to enable Fingerprint checks (i.e., shared accounts).
- Decide how many accounts can be shared in a single fingerprint.
- Click Save.
Required permission
Users must belong to a Role with the Garden > Moderation > Manage permission to use this feature. This is generally reserved for Admins and Moderators.
To learn how to access and manage your Roles and their permissions, check out the article below.
Mark user as Troll
📝 NOTE: For first time or more minor trolling offenses, you may want to consider warning the user first. If a moderator determines that a user hasn't corrected their behaviour after being warned, use of this tool is warranted and recommended.
- Navigate to the Troll user's profile page.
- Click the actions menu and select Mark as Troll.
Now, a red "Troll" label displays on their profile page. This label is only visible to Admins and Moderators; the Troll will receive no indication that anything occurred.
In addition, a Troll user's posts are visually flagged to Admins and Moderators, as you see below:
Remove Troll status
- Navigate to the Troll user's profile page.
- Click the actions menu and select Unmark as Troll.
Where could other users potentially see Troll posts?
There are a two circumstances where a Troll's post could slip "under the radar" and be accessible:
- Via a direct link. While unlikely, if a user received a direct link to a Troll's post, they'd be able to circumvent the addon and access it.
- Troll posts can still technically be found via external search engines, as they'll find and index the content.
For these reasons, it's important to know when to mark a user as a Troll and when to simply ban them and delete their posts entirely.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
