How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

Thanks to Holly from NTEN for the heads up for this.

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

Angry people looking for fights will inevitably try to poison successful Internet communities. Columnist Cory Doctorow looks at ways to remove the poison without killing the discussion too.

By Cory Doctorow, InformationWeek
May 14, 2007
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199600005

The Internet Tough Guy is a feature in all Internet social forums. These are people who poison discussions with anger, hatred, and threats. Some are malicious. Some are crazy. Some are just afflicted with a rotten sense of humor. Whatever their motives, they're a scourge. It takes precious little trolling to sour a message-board. A "troll" -- someone who comes onto an online community looking to pick fights -- has two victory conditions: Either everyone ends up talking about him, or no one talks at all. And where two or more trolls gather, they'll egg each other on, seeing who can anger and disrupt the regular message-board posters the most.

Balsillie: BlackBerry Shutdown Will Never Happen Again

Via Eweek

Balsillie: BlackBerry Shutdown Will Never Happen Again: "Balsillie: BlackBerry Shutdown Will Never Happen Again
By Wayne Rash
May 11, 2007


ORLANDO, Fla.—In a rare one-on-one interview with eWEEK, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that the event that shut down e-mail for BlackBerrys in the United States for hours last month was due to 'a process thing,' and that steps had been taken to ensure that it could never happen again."