Troll Cap 0.1a

Download Troll Cap 0.1a - View FAQ for 0.1 Release

After posting a comment on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, a man named Edward O’Connor called me out on my plans. Although I didn’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking when I wrote that, I decided that I’d better put up or shut up. After a day of work, I’m releasing Troll Cap, a free, Creative Commons-licensed plugin for WordPress, allowing any user, expert or advanced, to add Troll Cap functionality to his or her WordPress blog.

Much to my disappointment/chagrin/fury, somebody else stole my idea and wrote a basic WordPress filter plugin to mark individual trolls, so I had to one-up it. Troll Cap is ridiculously extensible, still pretty buggy, and most of all a ton of fun to write. It should be easy to use, too. I’ve built it to look as close to something that 37signals themselves would write.

Here are just a few of the features in Troll Cap:

Manual Flag Mode: In this mode, just type <!--troll--> anywhere into the troll’s comment. The troll’s post will automatically be capped.

AJAX / IP Blacklist Mode: Using SAJAX and the WordPress database, a power-user can blacklist certain IPs into permanent troll status. This can be enabled or disabled at will from the Troll Cap preferences.

Custom Template Tag: Troll Cap has its own template tag, troll_link, that allows theme authors to enable Troll Cap AJAX links in their themes. It even allows for a small popup “What is this?” box on capped posts so users can learn more about the Troll Cap.

Standards Compliance: Troll Cap’s HTML/CSS validates to XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0. All JavaScript code complies with the HTML DOM. All layout for the troll cap posts as well as the popup are contained in editable CSS files. If you want, you can even turn off CSS and just have a Troll Cap image displayed inline, with the class “trollcap”. If you are a theme author and want to incorporate the Troll Cap post styles into your theme, you can turn off Troll Cap’s default stylesheets and tell it to use the theme’s default style.css.

In the future, I plan on adding a peer editing mode which will allow users to troll-vote a post much like Slashdot and Digg do. The architecture’s in place.

Of course, with any alpha release, Troll Cap is buggy. I mean really buggy. You can use it and it will work, but it is much like the Flock Developer Preview. All known bugs are posted in the FAQ. If you’d like to correct them and send me a diff file with the changes, I’ll credit you for the fix. I’d like to keep this a collaborative project and contribute to our community.