Stopping Stalkers

We’ve all been there. One day you’re out enjoying the net, and the next you have a complete and total turd making your online life hell! What do you do? There are a lot of answers to this, but really it boils down to two types of reactions. You have to change your behavior, and you have to change your online accessibility.

Changing your behavior is pretty obvious. Once someone starts abusing you online, calling you names, or just angry-ing up your blood, walk away. This is the hardest thing in the world, but do it. Most idiots will stop once you stop feeding them, which is why we always say ‘Don’t feed the trolls.’ When people go past your garden variety gnome moron, however, and start harassing you (and you know there’s a difference), you need to do more than just change how you react. Basically you need to stop making the problem worse. If you’re angry, you log off, walk away and grow the hell up, or you deal with the shit-storm you created.

On the technical side of things, there’s a lot you need to do. If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or any public forum with this person, you block them. If they evade the block by making new accounts, report them. Most sites have a policy about this, and the more you have to report them, the more likely they’ll get banned. Always remember to mention ‘I blocked this guy because as he was harassing me. Now he made to do it again.’ This will take a lot of doing, and a lot of arguing, but it will get things done. Block them on IM, Skype, everything you can think of that they might have.

Once you’ve taken care of them on sites outside your control, let’s look at your site, which is the meat of this post.

If you have a stalker, you want them to stop being able to contact you, right? If you have a blog, block their email in the comment blacklist. Just turf ’em. You don’t need to see them. If the harassment is bleeding into real life, I would moderate them instead, since you might need the comments for later proof in a legal case, but the effectiveness of that is in doubt right now (it’s too easy to fake that stuff). Make a note of the IP address and block that as well.

In fact, block the IP from your server via .htaccess:

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

If you have a firewall on your server, toss the IP in there as well. This servers two purposes. Most importantly, you no longer have to deal with nasty comments, but also, you are no longer feeding the troll, because the troll can’t get in. Of course, this isn’t perfect, as most of us use multiple IPs because our addresses, even with high speed, will change. This will only become more and more futile as we get into IPV6. In fact, you may recall I once said Don’t block IPs. When I said that I was talking, specifically, about spammers and bots. Blocking them by IP is futile. But blocking your stalker? Actually effective in certain cases, because some stalkers aren’t very technical. Alas, it’s only some. When you have a smart stalker, who knows how to use proxy servers to their benefit, you have to start learning tricks like How to Block Proxy Servers via htaccess.

This won’t stop everything, of course, and I generally spend a bit of time with my firewall (I use CSF), activating the Real Time Block Lists (RBLs) and adding in certain countries to my block list using CC_Deny. I don’t like doing that, but sometimes you have to. I’m a pretty big advocate of Bad Behavior which, while it runs via PHP, can be instrumental in stopping bots. That helps me sort out proxy servers, since once you understand how Bad Behavior works, you can check its logs and weed out the proxy servers. Grown up Geek’s post on How We Block Proxies, Bots, Scrapers, Trolls & Assholes is an invaluable resource here.

This also doesn’t stop email, and I personally filter all of mine on the server level. This does mean I keep the emails on my server, but again, this is something useful to have if these things ever go to lawyers. If you use IMAP, generally it’s okay to keep the emails up on the server, but it’s also a good idea to save them as .eml files to your computer, as they store all the data needed to trace back the emails. Most of us never need this, but the CYA is worth it.

When things start to spill over into your ‘real’ life (or at least your physical world), don’t be afraid to go get a lawyer. Yes, this will cost money, but if you’ve done all this and can use it to prove this person is escalating their behavior, a good lawyer will know how to get you a restraining order. If you’re not being stalked today, lucky you! I would strongly suggest you do a few things in advance, though! You already know not to put anything out on the net if you don’t want it found, but I would also say that if you registered a domain, consider making your registration private. That will hide your address and phone number. If they’re calling your phones, the phone company can block them, and it’s definitely worth your while to ask them to do so. Peace of mind is part of the reason, but the other is that if you ever end up in court, you can show them the phone company records.

A word of legal advice, here. The courts recently ruled that an IP address is not a person. This means that even if you have a bunch of emails and comments and whatever from a specific IP, that alone won’t be just cause for a warrant to break the door down. That’s a good thing for most of us, and means you’ll have to do detecting the old fashioned way.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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