Forum Moderators: rogerd
This guy is a troll or a semi stalker or whatever you want to call him...I'm about fed up. There's nothing that can be done legally short of filing suit, and he's wealthy, could easily outspend me.
He follows me around the net, posts where I post to tell everyone how much I suck (I'm a Nazi, Sieg Heil, because five years ago I banned him from my forums due to abusive behavior...he's never gotten over it). He copies stuff from my website (just copies the full source code - I've inserted a transparent 1-pixel gif in a few things, but haven't taken advantage of it...YET) and now his copying the source code has put a comment box on his pages and I'm getting vulgar comments. (He hasn't tried to break into the board in awhile that I'm aware of...now he's onto my regular site)
This isn't a teenager - he's in his late 60s, a grandfather and has a sick wife - and I'm not the only one. We have our own club now of women he harasses. He's smart enough to have never made a threat, so cyber stalking laws won't work.
I'm fed up after five years of this. I've ignored and ignored and it doesn't matter. I'd like to at least give him some grief for awhile and keep him off my site and from stealing my writings (to mock). Actually, I can handle his mocking me, his blatant lies about me and all the Nazi talk (or is it Commie? He can't make up his mind). But he takes stuff others have written and mocks them too. They have thinner skins than I do, though mine is starting to stretch a bit.
Opinions on redirecting him somewhere?
He follows me around the net, posts where I post
If he is following you, you won't have access to the website's servers, so how would you redirect or ban him? Seems to me that you could report him on whatever board you happen to be on and get him banned.
He hasn't seemed to have found you here, I know WW would not put up with it.
[edited by: MThiessen at 2:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 27, 2006]
I basically redirected him by IP to a "under construction" page. He went away for a little while be eventually came back under a different IP.
Best case he has high-speed and is always on the same IP. Then you can redirect him for months at a time before he catches on... =)
Another technique I've used is to drop a special cookie on their machine. Then I check for this cookie and do the redirect, just like I do for the IP. This helps if they are always coming on though a different IP. They can clear their cookies of course, but sometimes they don't realize that is how you are doing it.
Make sure the redirect page is believeable too. You could even redirect to a message that said the board has been removed due to spam problems or something. Make him believe it has disappeared for good, so he won't come back.
Just don't ever reply to his angry emails (if he/she does send emails to you). That only feeds their fire.
Good luck!
My user name says I have one post, and I know I've posted on this site before...maybe my old posts were deleted. Anyway, that's why I've stopped (for the most part) of using my real full name when I post on blogs and boards. I'd like to think he's too busy with myself and the other women to bother spending time on a place like this, where he might actually learn a thing or two about source code. ha.
Max, the one good thing about this guy is that he's not very knowledgeable about computers. He's learned a little about IPs because that's how I was keeping him out of the board (or rejecting his ongoing memberships). But he thinks copy/pasting source code into his funky template is a "screenshot." The best part of all is that he gets obsessed with pages of mine, pages that nobody else visits. I wouldn't even need his IP and could tell it's him by the 30-40 refreshes every 15 seconds of that page. LOL. But that's very helpful to me.
About that cookie...would you mind sharing that with me and telling me how to use it? (Private message or email is fine) I'd love to be able to use something like that to add to my arsenal of tracking weapons.
Part of me wants to send him to a page that says "Due to harassment from Mr. X, I just can't take it anymore and have shut my sites down."
But that wouldn't last long, because he would be so excited he'd post all over the place gloating and others would say "Hmm, works for me." So I'll have to stick to the more mundane server crash, don't know when I'll return.
Thanks so much!
Juls
If your software has a global ignore feature, sometimes that's effective. I've seen people post for weeks without ever noticing that nobody replied to them. (I guess that's one measure of their self-absorption.)
I've decided to go ahead with the redirect on both the main site and the board site (has its own domain). He'll be directed to a page that says the servers have crashed and the site will be down for repairs for awhile. This may at least buy some time so he (hopefully) gets obsessed with something/someone else.
Juls
