Trolls are a fact of internet life. In the simplest terms, internet trolls are people who make inflammatory posts to internet articles. Their only purpose is to illicit an emotional response from other visitors to the article. Any response to their comments, especially ones that are emotionally charged, "feeds" their sense of satisfaction. The only real way to deal with a troll is to ignore them. Even down-ranking them feeds their destructive behavior. It becomes a badge of honor to have extremely negative rankings. That said, it often feels impossible not to respond to them. And even if some people successfully ignore them, others won't. And so the trolling persists. I propose that AOL make a small change to their commenting system on the sites they own (I am specifically referring to Autoblog and Autoblog Green at the moment, but any others would be included as well) such that: 1) Users could hide other commentators who they feel are trolling. This would only hide these commentators from the user who did the hiding. Everyone else would still see the commentator's posts. 2) Once a commentator has reached a particular level of negative feedback, they are automatically hidden to all other users on the site. They could be manually un-hidden if someone chooses to do so. It would take a significant number of down-ranks to trigger this system, so simply making a single, unpopular post would not be enough to be "banned". 3) After a given amount of time (measured in months) during which the auto-hidden commentator has made posts, but not received more than a small number of negative rankings, they would be "rehabilitated" but on probation. If, during probation, they accumulate a significant number of negative rankings, they will be permanently hidden. If, on the other hand, they receive a certain number of positive (or neutral) rankings, they will be returned to normal status. Probation should last for a minimum of 6 months. 4) Anyone manually hidden by one user would never be automatically un-hidden under any circumstances. Although there may be some small collateral damage here (people who continuously get down-ranked merely for having an unpopular opinion), it does deal well with true trolls. These people get off on attention. By depriving them of visibility (after a reasonable number of chances to clean up their act) their only source of nourishment dries up. The system is not perfect. Trolls will simply create new accounts, but that is an annoying proposition even for them. I think, however, such a system would cut down on the amount of this useless and community-destroying behavior. We, the undersigned, strongly encourage AOL to implement such a system in an effort to keep their sites relevant, and the discussions on these sites useful.