Yep, this is easily the best way to deal with people who are committed to messing with an online community.. Make them think they're still having an impact wh

Yep, this is easily the best way to deal with people who are committed to messing with an online community.. Make them think they're still having an impact when they're not.. I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else. Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own. Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..