Monday, April 30, 2012

Blocking Spammers and Moderating Trolls on YouTube




It's annoying how social media platforms make it difficult to block people. When you are being followed all over the internet by a spammer like LPBband, a boring generic techno group, it should be easy to block them from sending you messages and emails, and from posting comments on your pages.

Unfortunately, it's not always easy to figure out how to block someone. In fact, it is often a hidden option. In such cases, you need to Google it, for example: "Block YouTube user". Even then, the instructions are odd.

QUOTE

To block a user, navigate directly to their Channel page. On their Feed or Featured tab, you will see a section on the right hand panel of their page which states Created By: UserName. Next to their name is a drop-down arrow where you will see (Block User | Send Message). Click Block User.

END QUOTE

There is no way you'd know that the little down arrow next to Created By: UserName would be where the Block User tool would be found.

Block User should be a prominent button next to Subscribe To User or similar action.

This obnoxious LPBband is a pain in the butt.

On my Str8 Sounds page on ReverbNation, they kept adding themselves to my Fans list, then deleting themselves, than adding again, over and over, so they'd remain in the Recent Fans display, thus visible, rather than dropping into the All Fans link. (ReverbNation has recently changed their UI user interface, so Fans are configured into Top Fans and All Fans.)

LPBband kept manipulating my Recent Fans display, posting self-promotional comments, and sending me private messages to check out their latest song.

I finally got fed up with their tactics. I deleted them and blocked them from my ReverbNation page. But they keep showing up on my other social networks.

It's a shame that Blocking users is often hidden in a drop down menu that is rendered as a tiny arrow, and is not intuitively evident as the location of the block tool. 

See: official YouTube answer to Blocking Users on YouTube





YouTube trolls typically are among the most immature and vile of all internet trolls. They tend to use F bombs, racist attacks, sexist slurs, and other junior high school mentality tactics.

For business and individual YouTube accounts, it's a good idea to configure your settings to Allow Comments with Approval Only.

That way, you can monitor all comments prior to them being visible to the public. If you feel a comment is trollish, abusive, irrelevant, or flat out insane, you can delete it and it will never have been seen to pollute your YouTube video.

But you must set this preference for each video you upload. For some mysterious reason, YouTube does not provide a setting to make this universal for all your videos.

To do this in the New YouTube User Interface:

Video Manager > Select a video > Edit > Advanced Settings > Allow Comments > Approved.

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