Obesity Help Tips: How to Block Trolls

For those of you who might be new to Obesity Help, I figured it might be helpful to provide a brief walkthrough on how to block a troll.

You can do this by hovering your mouse over their user picture - this will cause a dialog box to pop up. One of the options is "Block." If you click that, you'll be taken to a page that asks if you want to block this user, and then you can click "Confirm" or "Cancel." Confirm will block the user. This means you will no longer be able to see their posts, and they will no longer be able to see yours.

This can be a very useful tactic to dealing with forum trolls - "feeding" trolls, i.e., responding to them, can often just encourage more trolling.

Personally, I think the block feature should be used sparingly, since even the people I don't much care for here sometimes have good advice, or need good advice. Trolls, however, are fairly useless.

I hope this helps!

I can almost imagine her doing the Oprah thing here. "You get a block, and you get a block. EVERYONE GETS A BLOCK!"

Nah....who would she entertain???? And she's never remember, anyway!

YAY!!! Thank you so much for this. I posted something a couple days ago on an applicable but rarely used board because I assumed a certain "troll" would not go there, and I genuinely did not want this person's feedback. However, I would still like some feedback and now that I know I can block I will happily move my post!

Thank you so much for this info!

Very valuable button. I have used it at least 3-4 times. Good share!

I blocked no one for years. I have one now. I can ignore attention seekers. I've learned valuable things from all sorts of people.

I see some new folks over block easily. Usually they get twisted over responses on a post and block a bunch of people who have been around awhile.

I think not responding is better than excessive blocking.

I definitely agree, excessive blocking isn't great - I also see new users blocking anyone who says something they disagree with. Not super useful! I've currently got two people blocked and it's definitely beneficial for me. (One of the two is a troll, the other is just really freaking annoying.)

I don't have anyone blocked and I would counsel newbies to block wisely.

It is sometimes beneficial to hear what you don't want to, so to block because lifestyle advice from people who have BTDT doesn't bolster your not so good choices, is very counter productive.

Review your block list every month or so, or when you have calmed down, maybe?

Yup, definitely. Huge difference between blocking a troll and blocking someone just because you don't like what they have to say :)