Combating Pseudonymous and Nymshifting Abuse/Vandalism in Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Vandalism is not "free speech" (it's not even meant to look decent)
RECENTLY I've noticed that the SoylentNews (SN) IRC network was attacked quite badly by rather horrible trolls. It went on for a long time. They even created a channel whose description is "your mother was the cameraman for goatse". We had similar vandalism in our IRC network until we took action against vandals and criminals. They basically try to associate the site (and server/network) with abhorrent stuff. They create channels that associate the site with actual crimes, not just disgusting things. They seed a false narrative. They try to harm reputations by association.
To be clear, tackling this stuff is not about censorship but about curtailing overt abuse by people who had already been banned over a decade ago for abuse not only against admins but also their family members. It's about dealing with people whose sole intention isn't to express themselves but to vandalise networks, communities, sites etc. Demoralising people isn't always easy, but time-wasting is.
Someone called "Ingar" in the SN IRC network said to me, "add an ignore for aristarchus and get on with life."
Well, you cannot mute or ignore a user for everyone in the channel and the user can change name, access network etc. With Tor and VPNs it's more complicated.
So another approach is needed.
To be clear, this isn't a case of dealing with opposing views. It's about vandalism.
In our case, we had to deal with people who interject sex into tech channels to gross people out, repel women, and derank logs in search engines etc. Perverts and people with mental defects tend to do this, knowing it would mostly harm the targets of these attacks.
SN could temporarily use a "voice" system. It means people who come in are given "voice". If trolls come in, they can be denied voice. This way they get bored, move on, then the channel mod(e)s are changed back (reverted/restored when things calm down).
"Probably no reason for non staff to have voice in this chan anyhow," chromas said about #governance. I told him that "SN's main channel and the governance channels could weed out the abuse easily; see M and m in various manuals," which may or may not be applicable to the IRC daemon of choice (most of them support this functionality).
IRC isn't optimal, but it has worked well for over 35 years. That's why it survived for this long. Freenode pretty much collapsed and later this year we'll have a scoop (an insider's story) about it. NDAs are about to expire. █