How do you fight spam and trolls on a forum?

[celerisk]

My answer to that would be active, present moderation, with rules that are (more or less) obvious.
You see closed threads, hear about a banned member every now and then,
and, overall, mods are actively around both in and out of the threads.

Well, Blizzard has a "better" idea:

 

[rover2341]

Honestly It wont bug me that my name is out there, Not to say I really want my name out there, But If it means I will spend less time looking for what i want, and less spam fine by me.

 

[esb]

I guess the Ban Hammer needs someone's name to angrily yell when it hits.

 

[Renendaru]

Well, I've never posted on the Battle.net forums. Guess I have more reason to not to. I don't actually care about showing my name, the problem is Blizzard thinking this is a solution.

 

[Slapshot136]

holy crap.. guess I won't be using those forums then

 

[Romek]

One of the joys of the internet is anonymity. This just destroys that.
Not to mention that it's not a solution to the 'problem'.

 

[Ninja_sheep]

"Hey blizzard, my name is John Smith!"

What about you just use a fake name? That going to work?

 

[INCINERATE]

i post there now and then.. so i think its a good idea to clean it up a bit... Though i never put in my real name/surname for my battlenet account anyway... so it doesn't matter to me

 

[Slapshot136]

I don't really like the idea of almost being forced to lie, I like my privacy but I still don't like the idea of having to use a fake name either..


but I do think that this will help stop the spam

each account would be linked to a game or key, meaning if you get banned for being a troll, your cd key is banned as well, which is much more incentive to not troll then on a forum where a new account costs nothing and a ban is at worst an ip-ban

 

[Switch33]

This situation works only good for the people who have fake sounding names. Cuz then blizzard will just think they are fake names when they are real. Like Billy John. . .lol

Honestly, this isn't a counter measure to spam. It's a surrender of the privacy rules of the internet. It's like waving the first amendment almost in a sense that you are "being forced to identify yourself in speech on the internet."

Then again. The blizzard forums aren't used by everyone. But this means probably very very few people will want to use them now.

 

[D.V.D]

Oh great, I have the most uncommon name ever and blizzard decides to do this...... welcome fake names.

 

[celerisk]

We will finally get to know that TooHotToHandle is actually Sandra Smith.
Who also happened to play WoW for three years where she "married" TinyTimmy (actually Tom Jones).
Tom is rather happy now, having seen her daring pictures over at Facebook.

It all adds up.
Only good things can come from there



" each account would be linked to a game or key "

They already are. You need to add your CD-key.
Obviously, that doesn't cut it.

 

[NightShade]

[YOUTUBE]<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FBwTpHNZDpQ&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FBwTpHNZDpQ&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>[/YOUTUBE]

husky rant.

 

[Dave312]

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707

Some really good points raised there, most of which I totally agree with.

The thing I am a little unsure about is whether this Real ID thing is now compulsory when playing Starcraft 2? I was always under the impression that it was optional, much like connecting to your Facebook account.

For me knowing my real name is not an issue, so I have no concerns. Both my first name and last name are in the top 10 most common names. In my previous job, I even worked with someone who had the same name as me.

 

[Monovertex]

^I just wanted to link to the above linked comic .

 

[black.sheep]

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=134496
Report of the very first victim of this system.

 

[Xienoph]

Well, back to topic!
You can fight spams by using (good) captcha in the registration process and optionally when posting. That'll get rid of spam bots.

Human trolls and spammers are harder to fight. The most common solution would be the one Blizz has suggested (no, not the real ID thing). Have people rate each post and hide any non constructive ones. I particularly like Youtube's implementation of that. But, this system needs a lot of non trolling people. I'm not sure if Bnet forum has enough users for this.

Bottom line is, diligent moderation and banning trolls.

 

[celerisk]

Well, as the Blizzard Account Security suggests: " Sharing your account info is simply a bad idea ".

Or the " We urge parents to instruct their children to never give out their real names ", and other interesting and related advice in the privacy statement.

 

[Slapshot136]

does anyone else think that the names will be the names used from CC info and thus giving a fake name will be significantly harder, or am I just paranoid?

 

[azareus]

It will be like this:

Hey Blizzard, i'm John Smith! (Not my name)

Me too!

Me too!

Me 2!

x10000