Banned/Trolls: advice on how to stop them.

Recently my friend has been banned from the site for defending his friend from trolls. They reported him for sexual misconduct; It brought to my mind how easy it is to false flag someone and get them either suspended or kicked off a site entirely. A similar problem happened about a year or so back on Youtube.com, wherest a hackertroll named CONJOPI was false flagging popular Let's Players into getting them kicked off the site. A few channels even when into "lockdown", giving the troll and supposed team nothing to go up against them with. Eventually the problem was fixed after about a month or so, and so far no one has done any serious damage.

Which brings me to my next point. Trolls thrive off of conflict; the best way, some people think, is to deprive them of contact so they get bored and move on. A few trolls I have met personally go as far as stalking the person and doing anything in their power to get the user banned. All the popular sites, including twitter, Facebook, Youtube and deviantART have trolls, at varying degrees.

1.) Don't feed the trolls. If you ignore them, they might go away. If they don't, this is why sites have administrators. Go to the Help bar, find the complaint section. Be polite; admins probably won't take a second glance at people who use improper spelling, grammar, too many emoticons, etc. This includes abundant swearing.

2.) Confront the troll in a closed, friendly manner. If you threaten them, they WILL keep trolling. Threats will also get you banned, especially if they are violent in nature.

3.) If nothing you do works, try to contact the admin. They do in fact take things like this seriously. Threats are a crime. This includes hate crime, of all natures.

4.) Do you know this troll in person? I myself have had a few trolls I know from school, work or even home threaten and verbally abuse me on the internet. Threats are, again, a crime. Internet harassment, along with text harassment, are also a crime. A good, strong scare from the authorities should be enough to stop the trolls. No matter how fun it is for them, no one wants to end up in a holding cell.

5.) Give them nothing to work with. Like I said, don't feed the trolls. The best way to get rid of something is to deprave it of what it feeds on.

I hope this helped. You can contact any of the administrators and file complaints through this website. Remember : You are not alone.