The moderation question

As you may have seen, the main result of my raising the issue of KC's increasingly extreme concern trolling was that a completely different batch of trolls took it as their cue to suddenly pop up out of nowhere and harass me for 24 hours, apparently because they've been nursing a personal grudge against me after I deleted one or two of their comments weeks ago.  I have now reached total saturation point, so just to give myself a break from the harassment for a few hours, I've temporarily changed the settings so that you have to be signed into a Google account to leave a comment.  It literally will be only a few hours, though - I don't want to curtail commenting too much during the election period, so I'll switch the settings back either later tonight or tomorrow.  Hopefully those people will belatedly take the hint and find somewhere else to go, but if they don't I may have to switch the settings back and forth when it gets too much.

One thing I will say, though, is that a key part of my moderation policy which has been absolutely crystal-clear for years is that any criticisms or questioning of my moderation decisions are deleted when I see them. If people are just going to flatly refuse to accept that, and are just going to re-post the same protests over and over and over again, and are then going to start demanding "evidence" to support my moderation decisions as if the trolls themselves are the higher authority I have to answer to, it becomes like an ongoing mini-insurrection, and I cannot be dealing with that on a daily basis. It would waste hours of my time.  So if pre-moderation is going to stay off in the longer-term, people are going to have to start behaving more constructively. (And unfortunately it only takes one or two people to spoil things for everyone.)

Returning to the issue of KC's concern trolling, a number of you suggested that a partial solution might be to warn people of his modus operandi so he's less likely to sucessfully deceive them. He mostly posts anonymously (we call him KC because he briefly used that name) and he has two different personas - one is as an openly gloating Brit Nat sneering about independence and telling unfunny "Nessie" jokes, and the other posing as a "concerned independence supporter" who posts misinformation about polls and says how "worrying" and "not good" it all is.  

Often he'll have little conversations with himself.  Concerned Independence Supporter A will ask for information about a particular poll, and then he'll go away and have a cup of tea, and regenerate into Concerned Independence Supporter B, who will come back an hour later with the "requested" misinformation and explain how worrying it all is for Concerned Independence Supporters.  It's just an attempt to sap morale, and it may work to a limited extent if you're not wise to what he's doing.

The reason I am wise to it is that, unbelievably, during the two years I had pre-moderation switched on, he used to attempt to post here just as relentlessly as he does now, even though I hardly ever let his comments through.  So even though his comments literally had an audience of one person (me), that was apparently enough of an incentive for him to carry on.  That speaks to a level of obsessiveness that is bewildering and almost frightening.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Midlothian and Moray West, Nairn & Strathspey for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.