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by ev1 2091 days ago
I've been dealing with a ban evader/forum shock image spammer for months now, and the place he is buying proxies from is actively doing BGP hijacking on resources owned by AT&T, Windstream, hospitals and universities - for the primary purpose of carding and fraud. I haven't managed to get anyone knowledgeable at those companies to figure out how to pressure the small upstreams (that are not those T1s) to stop it.
3 comments

Good luck. When I wrote forum software, moderation controls, what people might call shadow banning these days, and other filtering took up 70% development time. Retaliation was DDOS. I was one of Cloudflare’s first customers.
I'm about to start down a road that might lead to where you are, but my target audience is a bit more mature and laid back so it might not be an issue.

But what you said reminded me of a conversation we had here a month ago. I think it may be that I reserve image upload functionality for users who have proven their humanness (and their humanity).

In my case image quality matters much more than quantity, so I can afford to make that choice.

One forum that almost entirely eliminated trolling is the (now 20 year old!) Metafilter, which requires a one time 5 dollar payment to sign up.
That depends on perspective, and what you consider trolling. Yeah...the 5 dollars is a great filter for the vast majority of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] posters, but that just narrowed posters and moderation down to a particular echo chamber (not unlike HN, fwiw). If you are down with the content/tone of the majority of MF posts, you prolly think it's great. But just like HN, there are posters with 'cred' who can say most anything (things I would definitely consider a troll), the 'little people' who can say things, including trolling, as long as they don't deviate to far from orthodoxy, and the unclean who get moderated away (hey...they paid 5 bucks so can't just punt them). They have done a remarkable job at maintaining the illusion that they're some moderation utopia for a long time.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Sounds like you have an axe to grind with some of the political or ideological positions of the people who run Metafilter. I never said it was run as a user-administered democracy, it's run by a core group of about five people who also own the servers. It's their pet project.
It's their pet project with their pet axe to grind. I said as much. If you disagree specifically with the points I made about moderation, which was all I commented on, then cite where I'm wrong. Otherwise, accept it's just as much an echo chamber as all the others and not some magical moderation utopia is made out to be by it's uncritical fanbois. But "you just don't agree with their politics", which mostly I do, is just sad, lame apologist crap.
Could you drop some IP prefixes you believe are hijacked and timestamps? I can probably help out and bring this to folks who can take action.

(I have to deal with hijacks frequently and part of our investigation is beating on folks who have permissive filters and pressuring their peers to improve things)

Got an email? It's a bit more complex than some prefixes