The issues before Congress are often controversial, and it’s hard for some people to maintain their cool on the comment boards.

It takes a lot of discipline to pinpoint disagreements with others and to figure out how to resolve them. More often, debates descend into name calling or ideological insults.

The worst of it, of course, is “trolling.” Trolls lack the social skills to express their opinions and discuss them carefully with others, so they seek to disrupt the conversation. Our advice is “DNFTT“—Do Not Feed The Trolls by responding to their outrages and insults. Responding only encourages them.

But when you think about it, a comment board is poorly designed for good conversation. Imagine if you and 50 other people assembled in a room, and each of them could speak to every other person any time they wanted. It would be noisy, confusing, and frustrating, especially when some of them were yelling and cursing.

So we’ve created some comment controls designed to make our chat rooms more conducive to good conversation. The new controls allow you to tune out words you don’t want to hear, and they allow you to turn your back on commenters who have exhausted your patience. Or you can create your own little conversation among friends.

These controls are available to logged in users. You can create an account here. Log in here. And if you’re logged in, you can manage your comment control settings here. (They work best in modern browsers. Download Firefox here and the latest version of Internet Explorer here.)

Word Masking

The first of these controls we call “word masking.” If there are words you don’t like to hear—the “F-bomb,” for example—you can tune it out.

Instead of seeing it on the page, you’ll see a greyed-out area where it was. (Highlight any greyed-out area with your cursor to see the word underneath.) The F-bomb is one of a few words we’ve masked by default. Add or remove words as a logged-in user at the comment control page.

Our comment masking supports wildcarding, so you can block any word that has a bad word in it. If you don’t want to see the word “truck” or “firetruck” or “dumptruck,” you can do that by masking “*truck”.

Hidden Comments

We’ve also made it so that you can hide certain commenters entirely, a couple of different ways. As a logged-in user, you’ll see a new option that allows you to “hide this commenter.” That means that any comment by that person—technically, from the same IP address—will be hidden the next time you load the page.

Has a troll gotten really annoying? You can turn your back by hiding his or her comments, and you won’t have to see them any more. (Some people do change IP addresses, so you may have to hide their comments again once in a while, but it’s just a matter of one click to do so.)

Just so you know, we also “expire” your blocked IP addresses after a period of time. This function could cause you to unintentionally block commenters you don’t mean to, and it could slow down our site on your computer if you accumulate too many blocked IPs.

The other way to block commenters is by selecting “Show only comments of logged-in users, hide all others” on the comment control page. This will hide the comments of anyone who isn’t logged in.

You can always click to see hidden comments if you want, but if you and a few other logged-in users want to have a conversation among yourselves, you can. It’s still a big room where anyone can hear anyone else’s conversation, but a small group can speak among themselves in relative peace. Just remember that others can “hear” you.

Is this the end of trolling and rudeness? Certainly not. But trolls will have a harder time getting under people’s skin. They’ll have to either be polite or find themselves shunned by our many logged-in users.

At this writing, we’ve had almost 90,000 comments on this law. While there are lots of people having productive conversations, there are also many disruptive behaviors on display there. We’re hoping that these comment controls will make the comment board a little more peaceful and more useful for everyone.