Basically it’s is the abusive language that is hurled at you and thrown around casually directed at other members. Most of the times by members who cannot socially interact with another. As you can imagine this is not very interesting or motivating in anyway for anyone. 
Furthermore, people who are suspended but keep making accounts using different measures.
And I just realised I have bumped this after 4 months - after posting 
You can look at their IP address to know for sure (pretty sure) that the suspended user has created a new account. This may not always hold true as I have one member who signed up with one IP address and suddenly started logging in with another. The user hadn’t moved and has the same provider. Apparently the provider just shifted her to another address… maybe as an update for speed? But checking the IP is one thing you can try to see if they actually are creating new accounts. Also, are the email addresses similar?
We don’t get any abusive language on our forum… I guess we’re lucky. So suspensions are really working in your situation? That’s a shame. There are a few people that will always be a thorn in everyone’s side, no matter how many times they get warned of their “naughtiness”.
What if they use a VPN to circumvent this?
Did you ever try fingerprinting to fight this? We had it running, and at first it used to work, but now it seems to be broken.
FYI, as you may not have noticed this terse reply earlier in the topic, an increasing number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are sharing pools of IPv4 addresses rather than providing static IP addresses. CGNAT is the main method used.
This is one of several reasons device fingerprinting and IP address blocking are increasingly less reliable.
Many people are familiar with NAT (Network Address Translation) which is used in local networks. Rather than every device getting a public IP address, the gateway device has one public IP address and all devices in the local network receive private IP addresses, e.g router is 192.168.1.1 and other devices use addresses from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.254.
Yes, @ondrej had PM’d me and brought that up. That would be one way around it. But they’d still have to create a new email address - not that that’s hard to do, but it can be a bother… especially if you keep getting suspended. As I mentioned in our PM, this person - if he’s created multiple accounts after suspensions - sounds like a troll.
While I was reading about fingerprinting, I got to wondering whether the cookies Discourse sets on one’s computer could also be checked. A new user wouldn’t have cookies that are older than their “new” sign up date/time. That would work - if it’s possible to check them - even if someone used a VPN.
Got to eat dinner. I’ll give this more thought when I’m done. 
If possible, would this work even if the new user was part of one or more Discourse communities prior to yours? 
That’s something one of the Discourse team members would have to answer. I don’t know exactly what the cookies contain. It does seem “intreging,” doesn’t it though? I’m sure there has to be a difference in what is in the cookies as I am currently a member of 4 Discourse forums and I doubt if the same cookies are used by all of them. They’d each have to had set their own “variations” of them for them to work properly… I’d imagine.
Maybe going about it in a slightly different approach would be to have a third cookie set that IDs the PC/phone/iPad, etc… Then whenever that is used to access the forum - especially when a suspended user creates a new account - the cookie will show that PC was used to login before. IP address would even need be a factor. (I’ve logged in both at my own home and at my son’s home… different IP addresses but with the same cookies.) Thinking about more, maybe one wouldn’t need any additional cookies, just the fact that there are existing cookies already set. Then a log could show that cookies weren’t set because of already existing cookies. That could be one way to possibly indicate what you’re looking for.
But what happens should the user delete all cookies? You’d be starting from scratch. What a PITA a troll can be. 
We’ve been around 17 years, so we’ve seen all sorts of moments. Losing one of our original moderators to illness 2 years ago was probably the worst, though. It devastated the entire community, members and moderators alike.
We’ve had members fake their deaths complete with Photoshopped obituaries and distraught letters from their “spouses.” It’s actually mildly disturbing how many of those we’ve had over the years. Each thought they had come up with an amazing, original idea, I suppose.
Personal stalking was initially hard, but you become complacent to it, really. Most were harmless. Few occasions had to be escalated.
It isn’t bothersome at all. Especially with Protonmail.
Yeah, cookies don’t really help.
Sorry for the bump; there’s something new I learned over the past year, and I’d love to share it with the community.
If you’re a moderator that sometimes struggles to handle a situation, don’t worry. It happens. Even after 3 years of moderating it’s sometimes hard for me to handle some situations. But there’s a pretty simple method I recently discovered that helped reduce the stress as a moderator.
Recently our forum has been surging with activity 
, doubling that of last year, and as the only active moderator, the work I had to handle began to be pretty unbearable. So I decided to promote 3 long-time TL3’s to TL4(Leader) and see how much it affects the work I have to handle myself, and it worked! They’ve been brilliantly doing most of the small moderation(Such as closing threads, etc.), and the work I had to handle was minimized to 1% of that before the promotions.
Another interesting benefit of having some TL4 non-moderators is they can be pretty good people to reach out to when making harder decisions such as borderline user punishments. All of the punishments are discussed between the TL4’s and myself, and it definitely makes the decision-making much more efficient.
So how exactly did I choose the TL4’s from the 65 total TL3’s we currently have?
These are the following traits you’d probably want to look for:
I’ve been having these TL4 users since April, and I’ve had no issues with them. The little “experiment” I decided to try out was very successful. Most of the issues I’ve previously noted, such as the “difficult user” was easily solved by having 3 TL4’s put to place. It’s magic.
Hopefully this provides any moderator with some tips on how to manage some of the workload, and helps reduce some of the stress caused by moderation. I definitely have to say thanks to the Discourse Team for implementing TL4 in the first place – Who knows what would it be like if TL4 didn’t exist for our forum.
I am surprised you were the only moderator. Most moderators work as a team. However, I’m glad that you have found a way to help yourself and your community.
The funny thing is – We used to have 5 moderators active, but most of them became inactive after a few months. All 3 of the people that I promoted to TL4 were active for 100/100 days, and one is even active for 2 years, so I get some assurance they won’t just leave after promotion, which worked.
Personally, I was always thinking (on my forum) you might as well give them moderator instead of TL4 since a TL4 user should be really trusted and so should a moderator. However, your PoV on this has helped. I only used TL4 to see how well the user would do as a moderator to see if they could be trusted not to close or edit everything before I granted them moderation.
Are they still moderators at this point?
They still have their moderator permissions. Sometimes they come back to check back for ~1 week, but since they haven’t caused any trouble it doesn’t hurt to have them as moderators.
That does make sense; it’s probably the main reason TL4 is there. There’s something that makes having non-moderator TL4’s easier than managing moderators. I’m considering having them moderators soon, but I find it easier to have them as only a TL4. It’s probably because there was some previous trouble with review queue “collision” between moderators, where they argue over flag handlings. It’s pretty nice to have TL4’s just flag them and I can take care of them myself. It’s probably one of the benefits of being a solo-moderator. But I’ll still have multiple opinions on certain actions such as punishments and borderline flags, so it just works so perfectly.
This is indeed excellent advice, and I’ve been thinking the same thing for quite a while now… such that I want to incorporate this feedback into Discourse itself.
One idea I had is to dynamically show this advice when the flag queue is large, e.g. you are looking at a queue of 10+ flags, we might put in a little alert
That’s a lot of pending flags! Have you considered promoting some trusted community members to trust level 4 so they can help moderate your community?
like so
Awesome! 
TL4 could definitely be some method for non-admin moderators to “self-sustain” themselves by promoting some active users. This is definitely for our case, where our site-admins usually rarely check on the community, so it’s purely relied on the moderators to control the community, which means TL4 promotion is more than useful because moderators can’t grant others moderators.
TL4 is great because it’s a method for moderators to get some extra assistance, and the permissions are set so the non-moderator TL4 users get all permissions neccessary in forum-moderation, such as closing threads, edits, etc.
This would definitely be important for moderators, especially for larger forums where moderators are likely to be receiving hundreds of review queues. There should also be some email sent to forum admins if the system sees that moderators are taking on too many review queues, such as.
Hey there,
We are noticing that your forum is seeing an increase in pending review queues. Consider promoting some users to moderators or Trust Level 4(Leader).
Here’s a list of some active users <Side note: Discourse should list topnactive TL3’s>:
Active User 1 <Possibly include hyperlinks to their /admin page?>
Active User 2
Active User 3
I think the most important part is that site admins should be regularly notified about community health, and it might be a nice idea if admins are notified if the system detects too many pending review queues, etc.
This is definitely something any forum needs. 
Moderators usually don’t notice they’re taking on too much work, it’s important to have reminders like that.
Non è correlato a Discourse, ma mi ricorda una storia successa nel… 2001, credo.
Internet era molto diverso in quel periodo. Le regole non erano le stesse. Internet era ancora una specie di “novità”, l’ADSL era quasi un lusso e, soprattutto, credo ci fossero meno regolamentazioni legali sui contenuti dei siti web.
Ad esempio, il proprietario di un forum non era responsabile per i contenuti del proprio forum, per quanto ricordo… O forse lo era, ma Internet era comunque molto meno regolamentato.
Sono stato moderatore insieme ad altri su un forum molto grande per alcuni anni, in una sezione dove nulla veniva preso sul serio. Era un forum divertente, con ovviamente piccoli drammi come ovunque.
Uno dei nostri membri era un ragazzino (età compresa tra i 13 e i 15 anni, credo), che veniva un po’ preso in giro dalla comunità per il suo comportamento e il suo modo di scrivere. Sembrava così ingenuo e bizzarro. Un giorno, era arrabbiato per essere sempre preso in giro e disse che si sarebbe suicidato in modo molto sciocco. La gente rise, come al solito. Pensammo che stesse di nuovo facendo il buffone. E io, come moderatore (e anche altri), non prendemmo la cosa sul serio.
L’amministratore di questo enorme forum reagì rapidamente. Licenziò tutto il team di moderazione di questa sezione molto attiva del forum senza alcun preavviso e bannò definitivamente la maggior parte (se non tutti) i membri che avevano deriso il messaggio di questo giovane membro.
Questo fece capire a tutti noi, utenti regolari ma anche moderatori, che non stavamo vivendo in un mondo di fantasia e che le parole avevano delle conseguenze. La sua decisione fu difficile da digerire all’inizio, e molti di noi non capirono perché reagì in modo così “violento”, ma ovviamente prese una buona decisione. È quasi come se fosse l’unico ad aver colto la gravità della situazione.
Fu un momento difficile per molte persone, ma fu anche un buon modo per far imparare a tutti che non eravamo responsabili come avremmo dovuto essere, specialmente noi, i moderatori (che è… letteralmente il nostro lavoro e abbiamo fallito nel peggiore dei modi).
Il ragazzino non si suicidò, continuò a postare, era ancora considerato strano ma molto meno preso in giro (e talvolta incoraggiato nei suoi progetti) e le cose divennero… Sia le stesse che diverse. Il forum era ancora lo stesso e ancora divertente, ma tutti avevamo imparato la lezione. Non si verificarono più eventi simili su questo forum per anni e anni dopo questo, per quanto ne so.
A me sembra che questa persona dovrebbe essere messa a capo di più parti di Internet… e illustra anche il rovescio della medaglia della legge “regola assoluta di una persona”.
Condividi i compiti di moderazione con più persone. Avere un unico punto focale per tutte le decisioni di moderazione è faticoso e può portare a focolai indebiti e attacchi personali. Se c’è una sola persona responsabile, il forum è “tuo”? E se sei stanco, o irritabile, o in un brutto momento? E se ti trovi eccessivamente coinvolto in un argomento e vuoi delegare la moderazione a qualcun altro? È un percorso pericoloso da intraprendere.