Kill-filing repeatedly abusive commentors

This is advice for fellow blog administrators. If you don’t have admin privileges to the comment moderation utility on a blog, then ignore this post.

Many bloggers (feminist bloggers are a favourite target) get targeted by gits who like to pile up abusive comments on many posts, even when they know they’ve been put into permanent moderation, because they get a kick out of the idea of the blogger(s) reading the comments anyway. It’s hatespam. If you have email notification for posts in moderation, then you get the abuse sent to your email, a thought which they also love. It’s a particularly insidious form of cyberbullying, with the goal of intimidation and silencing of voices that bother them.

The first answer to controlling such comments is to enable the options where comments are only autopublished if that commentor supplies an email address and has had a previously approved comment (more on that later). That will catch any new gits posting abuse to your blog. Then killfiling (aka blacklisting* or spaminating) the malfeasants bypasses the moderation queue entirely – usually sending them to the spam bucket. The instructions below are specifically for WordPress users (com and org) but other platforms should allow similar kill-filing (if not, I suggest you change to a more flexible blogging platform – there are several).

In which the moderator apologises for dropping the ball

I have been distracted over the holiday break, and this has meant that over the last month or so I have allowed some commenters through whom I would normally have cut off at the pass. The tone of the blog has suffered badly as a result. Those commentors are aggressive and are discouraging other voices, and that is not what this blog is about, although I suppose it is an object lesson on how easily a few disruptive commentors can ruin a discussion. Such disruptive comments also violated the comments policy as soon as the wolves threw off their sheep-cloaks, and their later comments should not have been approved. It just encouraged the others (such as the liar in moderation right now who I am not going to approve), and I should have known better.

This blog is meant to be a place for explaining the basics of various feminisms, and for constructive debate with people who wish to engage in good faith. I’m no longer willing to entertain commentors who merely want to harangue feminists about how we’ve got it all wrong and just want to rule over men. They are stealing our oxygen, their woman-hating is palpable and they are boring besides.

So, although dissenting commentors spouting oft-debunked MRA cliches will continue to provide us fodder for future FAQs from the moderation queue, they will no longer be allowed free rein on comments threads. I’m about to go back and disemvowel and delete as necessary.

Sorry about the interruption to normal services.

P.S. Dissenting commentors who can engage in discussion without resorting to disruptive behaviours such as stereotyping and imputing motives based on perceived affiliations, or posting excessively frequent or excessively long comments, or other vexatious behaviours,  are still welcome.