Dealing with a flood of hate comments

After hosting the most recent version of this blog on Google's Blogspot for seven years, I decided to move to WordPress in 2017. I did this for three reasons: WordPress has a better comment system than Blogspot, I could import my archives, and I wanted something that would be mobile-friendly. For the most part, I have been very happy with WordPress over the last two years.

For the most part. One particularly nasty troll has been posting hate messages in comments for months, sometimes as many as ten hate messages per day. I have repeatedly told him his comments are not welcome, and that his comments will not be approved on the blog. I have shut down comments completely to stop the flood of hate, but that is the only option WordPress allows for shutting down nasty trolls. The lack of the ability to fully ban trolls is by far the biggest drawback to WordPress. If not for this troll and his hundreds of hate comments, I would be perfectly happy with this platform.

A note on how WordPress comments work: When a user is banned, his comments go straight to the "trash" folder. The "trash" folder acts like the "spam" folder in e-mail, where I can check the folder to see what is there. I get an quick count of how many comments there are by hitting "bulk edit" before deleting all of them at once. As of right now, my only choices are shutting down comments completely or allowing the troll to continue to submit vicious hate messages. The troll is perfectly happy with shutting down the comments section rather than being an adult and going away.

So, for the troll: Why continue to spend hours per day stalking my blog and Twitter feed to post hate comments that will never actually be published and are often deleted without being read? If you want to respond to me, get your own blog, or whine about me on your Facebook page. The only reason to do this on my blog is to harass me, out of personal vindictiveness.

I am re-opening comments for now, but from this point forward, I will be deleting all of the troll's hate comments without reading them. You can waste hours and hours per day stalking my blog and social media and submitting nasty hate messages in the comments, but they will not be read.

You are wasting your time. Go away and leave me alone.