Trolls and tactics to combat them

Trolls are a fact of life on discussion boards all over the internets, and from a month or two after I made my first foray into this world, I discovered the beast known as a troll. From the naked and petrified trolls, the first post trolls, the Ogg guy, on slashdot, to the haloscan highjacker on Atrios, I have been aquainted wih the attempts to limit or combat the tactics of the beast known as troll. Slashdot used moderators and a rating system, and ultimately changed quite a bit of their code to combat trolling.

Recently a commenter (millionthmonkey) who had a clue at eschaton posted a solution to combat a rather vicious (though I honestly have to admit that he made me laugh sometimes) tactic of blowing out the table formatting. A real pain in the ass. So millionthmonkey posts a css file modification or hack to the board, l. it is tested, found desireable, yet some are not sharing in that success. I have always heard that haloscan is to blame, I find that to no longer be true. It is a simple hack, like the one I did for a previously mentioned clutch of a '53 Plymout Cranbrook.

To start lets take a look at the Haloscan Hijacker tactic, which blows out the width of the window requiring a lot of scrolling back and forth to read comments. This is a pain in the backside and fortunately easy to fix.


Take a look at the bottom of the screen and see the amount of scrolling that needs to be done. Now imagine the time it would take to try to read the comment above, well there is a client side solution for this which when implemented changes the above to
something much more manageable. For example:



Now isn't that better. The difference should be obvious. Not everyone is comfortable editing files to make this client-side solution work. The good news is that we don't have to. The owner of any site with comments by haloscan can make a simple mod to one line of code and never be bothered with attacks that break formatting seen in the first image above. Since I like to open things up take a look around and see what I can fix, break or modify, I have discovered that the blockquote tag is sort of broken in the unmodified haloscan comment box.



Normal blockquote tags will indent the cited text, but screws the justification on the lines following the citation, but with a little modification that is no longer a problem.
I guess it really isn't a problem as the message remains the same, it just looks bad IMO.
Now with modifications to the css you can have the blockqote tag work as designed and add a border to boot. I happen to like the border.


Now I am going to see what other things I can do with css hacks for haloscan, and hopefully avoid breaking things. And if this post makes no sense, don't worry. If you would like more info just drop your request in the comments. It turns out that you can also make shaded blockquote boxes, and I like it.