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As if by magic, the troll disappears.
(Explanation: Enough flags in a short enough time span deletes the post.)
((To anyone of a certain age and who grew up in the UK: yes, I did have that quote in mind when I wrote the first sentence.))
Yeah, trolls need to be fed, or rather, don't need to be fed.
Interestingly, this is the same user (or at least, comes from the same IP address, and has a similarly structured nonsense email) as Thomas James. I've suspended both.
Oh yeah, and unsurprisingly Eliot Jones has the same type of email address, although no matching IP addresses.
Are all of these spam questions being deleted automatically if they're closed quickly enough, or is a moderator doing it by hand each time?
When a question gets three spam/offensive flags, it's automatically removed from the homepage. When it gets six flags, it's automatically deleted. We've suspended half a dozen users (I'm pretty sure they're all the same person). We don't have a way to ban an IP, but I'm looking into it. Suspending the offending accounts makes it a little bit more work for the troll, and an IP ban would help a little, but ultimately the troll just has to get bored. Thanks to everybody who's been flagging these posts as spam/offensive and flagging for moderator attention.
Everybody has been doing a good job of not "feeding the trolls" (i.e. nobody has left any frustrated comments to encourage the troll), so hopefully he'll go away.
It's just one persistent troll. We've had a couple in the past, but they haven't been quite as prolific as this one. One of the problems may be that MO is now running the beta 6 version of SE, which throttles new user activity much less. I've posted a feature-request to throttle users more harshly if their posts have been flagged spam/offensive. I've also emailed Fog Creek to ask them to ban the IP temporarily.
I'm glad you like the 404s :-).
For those who remember the anti-graffiti wall from "The Naked Gun", I sometimes wish a similar device existed for the internet. Web 3.0 perhaps?
@Yemon. Perhaps it will be included in Web 33 1/3.0
I'm getting sucked into discussion in comments at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/13948/cocky-people-on-mo and I have to say I'm not convinced it's the same person who was attempting scatological provocation a few hours ago (and failing quite laughably) .
Any thoughts from those who can see the underlying data/details?
@Harry: Those last two, that seems likely. Different voice from the "pure troll" who couldn't (be bothered to?) spell. Could be same troll with different voices; but as I said I'm not so sure. I think I've seen some similar to the present one(s) a while back, don't know if anyone else can confirm/refute.
Oops, I spoke a bit too soon. Guess the troll has phases of bothering to write semi-coherently.
Have put my share in, we'll just have to wait for the European contingent (and others due east) to lend a hand.
For these coming in late, last night featured a string of obscene and abusive questions such as we have not seen before.
All of them were from accounts with no contact information, and users with generic male names such as Elliot, Elliot Jones, Larry, Tom, Kevin Larson, Craig, Jerry and elliot-answers. There were frequent references to feces and sex. Mathematical terminology was used occasionally, but not in ways that suggested it was understood. Several of the questions were directing at insulting high profile MO users such as Qiaochu Yuan and Yemon Choi. (One of them may have insulted me; it specified that he was insulting one of the top four posters. I fling 1/4 of a gauntlet down!)
This morning, we are greeted by a flood of vague questions by Elliot. None of them are blatantly offensive, and they suggest some awareness of mathematics, but none of them are the sort of thing that has right answers either. There are also so many of them that one can't believe any serious thought has been put into them. In general, they would probably get attacked by some people for vagueness, and answered seriously by others. If you are wondering why we are so unanimously opposed to them today, you now have the history.
By going to a user's page, you can see the IP from which they were last active. For those suspicious of troll activity, but without a moderator's access to the logs, that can be a quick way to check a suspicion that two accounts are the same (note that this is just evidence, not conclusive either way: IPs can be shared legitimately and spoofed illegitimately).
Adding to what David says -- please, everyone, use the "flag as spam" and "flag as offensive" buttons extremely freely while this is going on. Shoot first, ask questions later. It's very easy for the moderators to verify that it's the same user, and believe me, we're watching the lists of downvoted and deleted questions today!
@Sonia,
no, I'd prefer not to give the troll any feedback whatsoever. We just want everything the troll does to silently disappear. Does "flag for moderator attention" run out as well?
Feel free to email scott@tqft.net or IM me <scott.morrison@gmail.com> too.
or email/IM geraschenko@gmail.com
Should we worry about bystanders (this "wider community" whom those of us who aren't Eeyorish are keen to reach, for instance) getting a misleading impression? Some of the troll's recent efforts look on the surface "vague but well-meaning" - is there any way we can flag up for casual users why such time-wasting is being squashed, without having to leave comments or waste moderators' time?
Thanks to everybody who has been helping by flagging posts. If you're out of spam/offensive flags, please continue flagging for moderator attention. If you're confident that it's the same troll, don't worry about leaving a detailed note ("the troll." is conveniently 10 characters long). I assure you that when you flag these posts, it saves moderators' time.
@Yemon: If you want, leave a comment along the lines of
This user has been trolling MO. See http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/192
Troll goes by the name Tiffany now.
@Anton,
is is possible to find out as much as possible about the user's location to contact his/her ISP and ask it to cooperate to find out who the troll is? [Disclaimer: I don't know how the law actually works with respect to privacy on the Internet; I just think that most provider's ToS include the line about privacy protection being contingent upon the person not engaging in unlawful/bad conduct.]
If you already have some information, please don't disclose it here, though.
The troll has now taken over a question, kind of. There is a question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/14032/finding-a-minimum-bounding-sphere-for-a-frustrum but on the front page it looks like it was asked by tiffany (the latest reincarnation of the troll)
Never mind, the question was asked by the troll in the first place under the name Bob
I almost admire his/hers persistence.
@Gretar: Are we sure that Bob=troll? It actually sounded like a genuine question (albeit one that I wish we didn't get on MO, but let's not start that all that snootiness/outreachiness debate again).
Time to start working on that Web 33.0 anti-graffiti wall...
(Sonia is completely correct: my apologies if I misled anyone.)
I'm guessing that this troll is getting stamped on fairly quickly, but is there any way that those of us with a high sense of civic duty can easily search for trollish posts? Since so many get deleted so quickly, I'm not sure I'd know to spot one of these - the early offensive ones were very obvious but now it's less clear. Searching for "troll" doesn't turn up much!
@Yemon: Well there are 2 bobs, one is not a troll and has a link to a university webpage. However this one has changed his name to tiffany which is a username used by someone asking about scateating earlier. I may be wrong but I think he is a troll. This is his userpage http://mathoverflow.net/users/3766/bob
Gretar: he hasn't changed his name: that was "Tiffany" leaving a troll-comment on that question, which was subsequently deleted.
Like I said, I wish we didn't get this kind of question, troll or no troll; but last time I and some others espoused this view, we were told off for Not Promoting A Good Image and Inclusive Mentality, so I defer to those less grumbly than myself;
We allow unregistered posting because it's really awesome! The more low-friction we can make the user experience, the better. We've had a lot of really excellent unregistered users (e.g. Richard Stanley had over 500 rep with his cookie-based account before he registered), and I definitely wouldn't want to exclude them. (Edit @rwbarton below: yes, this should go in another thread. Those downsides can be remedied by this feature request)
@Ilya: I know the user's IPs and ISP. I've been in touch with Fog Creek (since they directly control the servers), and they've been very helpful.
It should be somewhat harder for the troll now, but of course we'll ultimately just have to wait for him to get bored and go away. Please do keep flagging the posts, but don't waste any more energy than that. The troll is wasting plenty of his own time; there's no sense in him wasting your time too.
Unregistered posting has other downsides too; many new users have been confused about why they can't comment even on their own questions (which doesn't require any rep as I understand it) because they don't realize they're actually logged in as a different user with the same name. But, maybe a discussion for another thread.
I'm pretty sure Bob is not the troll. I think he's a genuine user who just doesn't have any experience with MO.
@Yemon: Ok my bad, I thought this was the same person. I agree the question doesn't look very good but it isn't trollish.
@anton: This is my only worry (well, MO-related, I have plenty of others elsewhere)... that in our frustration with the troll, our troll-meters start returning false positives. Now personally I'm not too cut up if a few genuine people turn up with ill thought out questions and are initially rebuffed, but back on that long elitism thread this was apparently a concern for some.
Anyway, as long as we don't flag Bob further, no problem.
Also, in troll-related discussions it's probably better to refer to users by their ID (e.g. 65) rather then display name (e.g. Ilya Nikokoshev) since it's trivial to change the latter.
@Andrew: 10k+ rep users can see which posts have spam/offensive flags, can see deleted posts, and have access to a list of all recent posts by new users. You're half way there. It might make sense to lower that threshold, but I can't yet ... we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
@Yemon: That's a fair worry. If a post is not completely blatant trolling, just flag for moderator attention rather than flagging as spam/offensive. The moderators have access to extra information (e.g. the user's IP and what he entered as an email address) which makes it much easier to determine who's who. I'm quite confident that all the recent posts have come from the same person (they've all come from one very small university), with two exceptions (which appear to come from a Hong Kong troll who we haven't seen in a while).
While I don't want to feed the troll, a couple of the deleted posts were targeted against a particular MOer (not Zev) in a way that made it seem unlike a random choice of target. Just to say that it might corroborate some of what Zev suggests and what Anton has said about the IP location.
@andyputman Apparently not. At the risk of sounding like one of the Four Yorkshiremen: what happened to the days when you had to go up to people in order to be such a jerk? (Natural selection sorely missed on the internet.)