User blog comment:Meighan/Wiki Wisdom: Reacting to Trolls and Vandalism/@comment-961279-20120623151924

People who have been around wikis for a long time know this, but for those who are fairly new to wikis (and other websites where a community of people gather) might not.

Few troublemakers have the dedication to be long-term troublemakers. There's some that will keep at it, making new accounts or using different IP addresses, but most give up. You don't give them what they are looking for and they go away after a while. In a way, you "outlast" them. Not in the sense that this is a competition, but in the sense of "it's a nuisance for a while, you deal with it and fix the problems, and then the nuisance is not there any more".

For the ones that continue to cause problems, that actually works against them because it becomes easier to see patterns in what they are doing. For example, there were three groups of accounts where each account had similar names, but the groups were different from each other (Steven1, StevenABC and SoccerPlayer5, Soccerplayer6, SoccerPlayer71 -- not the real accounts, but gives you an idea of what I mean). After a few months, some of the same phrases started showing up from one group to the next. Once that happened, I was able to see that they were all the same person. Those accounts are now all blocked along with the IP ranges that person had been using.