One of the greatest fears that companies or organizations have about starting an on-line community is the troll — a commenter who seems content to spew garbage and threaten unspeakable action against anyone for anything.  They quickly turn a fecund forum into a locale of bile.  No fair!

There are a many ways one can deal with these unscrupulous people, and I read about a technique – disemvowelling – in a great article about maintaining a healthy community  by Cory Doctorow at Information Week.  This is not new, but it deserves a mention every once in a while.

Basically, disemvowelling is stripping words of their vowels, and that forces people to carefully read to decipher what is written.  As the disemvowelling Wikipedia entry states (as of this posting):

When used by a forum moderator, the net effect is to mark the original text as deprecated, while at the same time not suppressing freedom of speech; after disemvowelling text is still legible, but only through significant cognitive effort, and disemvowelled text has the advantage that it will not cause offence to anyone who does not stop and invest that effort in reconstructing their message.

At first moderators did this by hand, but soon programmers helped by developing applications that do this automatically. 

Give Doctorow's article a read; he has more advice.  Or should I type, "Gv Dctrw's rtcl rd; h hs mr dvc"?

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