I admit I fell into a troll trap recently. It's very tempting if you've got too much time, and generally I don't want to leave false and possibly harmful statements unchallenged.

So I'd like to propose a label which can mark a post as trolling. All nodes marked as such would be a message stating that this node is considered trolling, and that you shouldn't answer it.

Such a label could also be used for filters, for example users could have settings not show troll posts in Newest Nodes or in the various other overviews (recent threads, SoPW etc.). Maybe we could even hide troll posts from Anonymous Monk.

I think the hardest question is how to mark a node as being a troll post. A rather simplistic approach would be to set an XP threshold, for example -5, and consider everything below that trolling. Or we could reuse the consideration mechanism. Or have a different method altogether.

In an ideal world all flames would just be reaped, but it turns out that it only works for very offending posts (and spam).

What do you think? Would it help to reduce troll feeding? Is it worth the effort? Could it be implemented with reasonable effort? Or should we be just more rigorous in reaping flames?

Update Ok, perhaps my idea wasn't the best altogether, thanks to all how answered. Fighting trolls seems to be even harder than fighting spam, and some of the proposed solutions can backfire. So I'll queue that into the "rejected ideas" mental category ;-)

In reply to Discourage Trolling by moritz

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