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Comment by imp | Hacker News Reader

Your post in the forums doesn't really mention spammers, but abusive users:

"PBH has run for over 10 years as a great place to get and share information about Colombia. Unfortunately, during the last few years, there has been a (very) small minority of people who thought it was ok to personally attack, threaten and harass, both on phb, on other websites and in real life, other members that they disagree with. You know who you are. "

It sounds like a different problem than just throwing up a captcha. Have you banned the users/IPs of the offending people? Can't you just add a "report user" button by each post and then have users or IPs with X number of reports automatically banned?

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Tried all of the above. We can control abuse on our own site, but once removed from the site, these people would start abuse on other sites (against our members). It went way too far.

Closing permanently seems like an extreme thing to do. If you've done all that you can do, then I don't see why you would feel bad about abuse on sites that you can't control.

Another slightly less extreme option could be to start over clean. Delete all user accounts and ban any IPs from users who have ever accessed your site from creating a new account. That way you don't have to close it down permanently.

Overall, I'm getting the impression that you feel personally guilty and responsible for the abuse against your users on other sites and are looking for validation from HN that it's okay to shut it down and move on. Maybe you should freeze new accounts and freeze forum posting for a month and see if you feel differently after some time has passed. That would also give your users time to cool off.

If it's time-consuming to run the site, then tell your users that you need a few select people to step up and act as moderators, otherwise the community will be shut down. If no one cares enough to moderate, then go ahead and shut it down. If they do care enough to moderate then write some basic tools to give them control to monitor abusive behavior.

There are plenty of volunteer moderators, that's not the problem. The problem is that there are a few people that will go through great (!) efforts to drag certain members through the mud (using other websites) and even threaten them physically, which in Colombia (I live in Colombia) is something that I take more seriously than if I were to live somewhere else.

So yes, I feel responsible for that, and don't want to run a website that somehow produces a result like that... Crap.

Well, that does seem out of the ordinary for a normal website. Then whatever you feel comfortable doing is probably the best thing. Keep it going, make it a read-only archive, sell it, or just delete the whole thing completely. You're probably the only one who can really decide.

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