Dealing with abusive users
jacquesm: We have this on a daily basis.We deal with it like this:- first we write the email that we would like to write telling them exactly how we feel- we then delete this email- we then write an overly friendly email which takes care of the users complaint and adds sugar on top as well as a pony.Usually they get the message and they'll apologize for their behaviourOne exception is made for people that threaten legal action, these are without exception barred from the service and requested to follow through. I really can't stand it when people pull out their 'lawyer gun' at the first opportunity, and it raises an immediate red flag, these are real trouble makers, and will continue to be so in the future, so we see no reason to have them in our userbase.To date nobody has ever followed through on our invitation to press suit.I really wonder what is wrong with those types, by the time I threaten to sick a lawyer on to someone I'm 100% prepared to go through with it, and I reserve that for those times where such action is really warranted, such as outright fraud.Wackos are a fact of life, as the profile of your site increases you'll have to deal with some of that anyway, better be prepared and use your support queue as the selector determining which 'wackos' are only temporarily deranged and which are really firing on 3 or less pistons. Those you can do without, even if they try to make more trouble later.A nice example from HN is the user 'arrington', a complete douchebag that made it his mission to destroy HN after being kicked off. It was 'before my time', but I've seen some of the fallout from it and it wasn't pretty, but it did go away after some hacks that made the site more robust against that sort of thing. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!