trolls in communities and how to keep your community civil is the subject of cory doctorow’s article How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community (what a great title!)

i absolutely LOVE the disemvowelling idea. this means you remove all the vowels from a post when the writer was being a hostile jerk. it nicely side steps the censorship issue, gets the message out to the writer & rest of the community that this behaviour isn’t acceptable & makes it so hard to read – it’s like throwing water on the fire!