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It appears our friendly neighborhood constiptionologist is repeatedly creating dummy accounts to perpetuate his trolling activity.

The questions are pretty quickly being downvoted and closed, but this sort of activity poses a risk of exhausting and alienating reasonable and responsible users.

What tools do we have to stop these posts from going up in the first place?

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  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/382770/906208
    – user35069
    Commented Oct 13, 2022 at 17:06
  • Why did you un-break the word? Leaving "constiptionologist" is probably okay, but we don't want to create Google hits for "const iption".
    – Someone
    Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 17:29
  • Because I was asking about "constiption," not about "constip tion." I don't see how Google's web crawlers should persuade me to make deliberate typos.
    – bdb484
    Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 20:25
  • @bdb484 the idea is that we want Google searches for "constiption" to bring up as few hits as possible (other than the question on the main site discrediting its existence). That way if the troll starts again (possibly on other sites), and people google something like "what is [the word]" and override Google's spell check, they'll just see our one post and misspellings of "constipation."
    – Someone
    Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 20:40
  • I don't know who "we" is, but I'm not persuaded that it includes me. I believe every use of constiption on this site is accompanied by a statement that it is a nonsense word, so I'm perfectly happy to have Google index that.
    – bdb484
    Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 22:54

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Oh, if only it were that easy

We can’t at a mod level and the staff don’t do it because it’s ineffective- trolls gunna troll and they’ll use a VPN to do it.

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Flag and downvote

As soon as an IP triggers several spam flags, it gets auto-banned for some time.

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  • 1
    If that's the case, it seems like an IP block is inadequate, as the user keeps returning -- rather quickly -- despite generating quite a few flags. I'm not an expert, but maybe an IP range block or some other mechanism might be available.
    – bdb484
    Commented Oct 13, 2022 at 18:30
  • 1
    ip-blocks are far from effective: you get a new IP by just turning off your network for 10 minutes.
    – Trish
    Commented Oct 13, 2022 at 19:44
  • 4
    I was the troll; I apologize for my spam. law.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1606/… I used Tor to circumvent IP bans.
    – Richard Phillips
    Commented Oct 14, 2022 at 3:59

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