My suggestions to mitigate this issue are as follows: 1) Educate readers that it is not ok to harass your Authors (or anyone really) but I get that your job is

My suggestions to mitigate this issue are as follows: 1) Educate readers that it is not ok to harass your Authors (or anyone really) but I get that your job is to protect your people. 2) Protect your authors through anonymity and teaching them good online habits. Pen names for younger authors is a great idea. Especially for first time authors who don't like the limelight and don't want to deal with the direct messages they will inevitably receive. And if you have a first time author coach them on the kinds of responses they can expect. Some negative reviews will get through unless you go to anonymous so education has to be part of that. 3) Join in the fight against online harassment. I don't have any links but this is a problem and people need to know that bullying (online) isn't OK. 4) Edit your posts. Grammar is much harder to make fun of if the mistakes aren't there. This is not a justification of others actions but a suggestion on how to avoid this specific type of bullying. 5) Be active in the HN comments and point out that specific comments aren't addressing content but instead just being nit picky. This could fall into the gratuitous negativity section of the HN guidelines but that's kind of a stretch. EDIT: The following are options but things you should not do. I tried to make that clear with the comments associated with these two options but I didn't make it clear enough. Don't do the following two unless you want to completely change your community. 6) This is optional but you can implement a login feature that requires people to link to facebook and then you can monitor your readers activity. It will loose you a ton of traffic but if it's really that important to you this is a way you can limit who can read your articles and thereby protect your authors. I don't think this is a good idea personally but it is an idea, only you can decide to lock down your content like that. 7) Public shaming, which IMO should be avoided at all costs, but if someone is harassing someone else this can turn the tables. It also leads to witch hunting and perpetuates a whole different problem that should be avoided at all costs. Online communities have jerks. No matter where you go you'll find them. HN is no exception. This community does not ban people from reading articles or monitor it's users outside of this site, so HN as an organization can't enforce this other than to spread the message and show people it's not OK. My suggestion is try 1-5 for now and see how it goes.