Hi folks,
Thanks for your thoughts on this. And for the reports last night. And of course, a big thanks to the Night Watch for their amazing work last night.
Horrible though it is when this happens, it is fortunately a rare occurrence, though of course we'd rather it never happened at all.
Over the last couple of years we've changed a few procedures here to try and help with this sort of thing which does seem to have helped a bit. To an extent it's a problem that we can never completely guard against. If a troll is really determined they will find ways and means to get back in and re-register, despite everything we put in place to stop this, so even if we had a moderator on duty all night, they'd be hard-pressed to keep on top of a person or group of people determined to rampage around the boards causing trouble.
There are some good ideas on this thread though and we're going to sit down with Tech and talk about which of those might be possibilities, as well as a few ideas we have ourselves. If anyone has any other thoughts, please do share them with us. We're happy to consider all options and we do want to do all we can to keep the site as free of this sort of thing as possible.
Thanks again for your patience and apologies to anyone who was upset by posts they saw last night.