You don’t have to look far to find a situation where the moderators of a community have simply been overwhelmed trying to keep up with the anonymous trouble makers. In February, engadget was forced to completely disable comments on their site due to some anonymous grandstanders (aka trolls). In reaction, Gizmodo seized the upper hand from a competitive position and posted why their comment system is better than engadget’s.  Aside from the grandstanding by Gizmodo, they provided some great ideas on how to build an effective commenting solution to allow their moderators to fight the trolls.

Many of the ideas Gizmodo shared are ideas I have highlighted in my previous posts in this series on anonymity; however, the one thing missing from Gizmodo’s post was how their commenting solution allows the community to participate in managing the trolls. In my previous post I explored ways to allow your community, the “army of volunteers” on your site, to establish some form of social control and extend the reach of your moderation staff.

There is no doubt involving your community in the moderation process is helpful, but only if your end users have a way to apply the collective opinion of the community to avoid the trolls. Simply put, your end users must have simple ways to leverage the crowd’s opinion and their own opinion to cut through the noise. The good news is your end users are only a mouse click away from leveraging these opinions if you implement some basic features in the user interface. Here are four things we have seen work:

Sorting – This is a simple feature but can have a big impact if you give the right options to the end user. Most of us are familiar with basic chronological sorting, oldest to newest and newest to oldest. These are nice options to preserve the flow of the conversation, but they do nothing to filter out the noise. Consider implementing two additional sorting options to leverage the opinion of the crowd, highest score and most active. Highest score allows the user to move the contributions to the top of the conversation that the community found most valuable. It is calculated by subtracting the number of thumb up votes from the number of thumb down votes for each user contribution in the conversation. Most  active allows the user to move the contributions to the top of the conversation that have had the most community activity where activity is the most total number of votes (thumbs up and thumbs down) and the most number of replies. These contributions may not have the highest score, but they most likely are intriguing.

Filter by Friends – Since the launch of social networks the web is full of statistics highlighting the influence our friends in our social networks have on us. For example, a recent study by research and consulting firm Morpace Inc. showed that 68% of consumers on Facebook are more likely to buy or visit a retailer if it received a positive referral from a friend.  The bottom line is most of us care what our friends have to say and we want to see their opinions before reading what others have to say. This feature accomplishes that goal by allowing users to filter conversations by just what their friends are saying. In order to implement this feature you will need a social platform to allow users to build a local social network on your site, or a way to allow users to bring their existing social networks (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) with them to your site.

Ignore – Everyone has an opinion and it is impossible to please everyone, so this feature allows you to stop trying. The idea is simple, allow each end user to maintain their own list of ignored contributors in the community.  When implemented effectively, the end user will not see any contributions by users they have ignored, but they will see a placeholder that a contribution was made. The placeholder is important because it gives the user the opportunity to expand contributions on a selective basis, especially ones that have received a high score or have a lot of activity.

Replies – This is a simple feature that can hide a great deal of noise in the conversation. The idea is simple, allow contributors to reply directly to what another contributor has said and link the reply to the original contribution. When implemented effectively, the replies to a contribution will be hidden by default and only expanded if the end user finds value in the first contribution. Additionally, the replies should be linked to the sorting values of the first contribution. This keeps the conversation around a contribution together and filters out the noise of replies that lack context outside of the original contribution.

You can have a big impact on your community and assert more control of the conversation when these features are implemented correctly and you place power in the hands of your end users. The San Francisco Chronicle recently implemented a number of these features on article comments and one of the most popular comments on the article announcing the new features sums up the impact you can have best, “I'm very happy about these changes. There were interesting articles in the NY Times and the Washington Post this week on trying to keep the comments area more civil. I particularly like the new Most Popular approach. It's fine to attack ideas. It's not fine to attack people. Can't we all just get along? :)”