The vast majority of Internet users are by far peaceful, sharing, and helpful. This especially holds true for the Mozilla Community. Though recently there seems to be a surge in the amount of Trolls parading around, and quite frankly, it needs to stop.
Daniel Glazman had to shut off comments a few months ago. Asa’s also been fighting this war.
Recently I wrote a rebuttal to a rather bogus article that made up “myths” in order to spread FUD. The author then retaliated like he has on many other sites by posting under several assumed names to rally his point of view (I’ve verified this thanks to David Hammond‘s help, who btw picked out the bogus comments just by eye). The author has been banned from numerous blogs/forums including Mozillazine for spamming his poorly researched articles and using false identities to create his own fan base.
Recently he’s decided to step things up by falsely using Asa as an endorsement. FYI he’s also using me as an endorsement by pulling my words out of context (just ellipse over the bad part) to make it look like I approve of the content rather than view it as an interesting fictional work. Here’s more on the topic. Yes he’s been asked to remove it or correct it so that it accurately reflects my intent when it was written. Making it appear as if Asa is against the very product he works so hard for, is just wrong (I can assure you Asa is a Firefox fan or he wouldn’t be doing as much as he does).
I’m somewhat pissed to see someone would go that far as a troll. I’ve even debated the idea of creating a blacklist, so we can collaborate and just block these individuals. I advocate people telling what sucks about Firefox (I wrote the reporter tool explicity so users can tell us what problems they encounter). But this childish trolling is just problematic. I’d question the legality of mis-representing someone, as well as the use of bogus names when leaving comments (may now be illegal).
I really hate to waste bandwidth with this type of stuff, but looking at other blogs recently, it’s becoming a real problem.