OK, points taken below from Oliver Keyes about talking to trolls.
But here's what (knock wood) got my well known long term abuse harasser
(1000+ nasty and/or threatening emails, hundreds of reverts of edits to
me during last 6 months) off my back without going to the cops --which I
easily could have done, and still would do if I felt they were coming to
my side of the continent with ill intent:
*Got roll back which helped with all the danged reverts.
*Updated and cleaned up his Long-term abuser page and made sure it was
real clear what the various modus operandi were and how to deal with
them since I'm not the only one he goes off on, just one of the worst
recently
*Put Wikimedia foundation email in a box at the top of project page so
editors with similar problems knew one place to go right away
*Added a bunch of info on the laws on cyber-harassment in HIS state and
linked to the larger article from the abuse page
*Every time he'd have a new spate of insulting me I'd go to some article
relevant to arrest/prosecution/imprisonment/psychiatric evaluation for
his various crimes and do some minor clean up, just so he'd get the message
since then just got a few non-threatening nasty emails and a couple
reverts; knock wood again that it keeps on working!!
So starting long-term abuse pages for harassers and using them is a
really good idea.
CM
On 5/9/2013 4:42 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
This would involve incredible overhead on the Foundation's role. It
also wouldn't provide any real protection for the individuals being
harassed.
Let's be clear here; there are really two types of harassment we
should be concerned about. The first is, simply, illegal; where such
harassment occurs, and a complaint to the police results, the WMF has
procedures in place to provide (for example) IP addresses and other
identifying information on receipt of a valid request from a court,
and these can then percolate back through ISPs and such to identify
the person responsible for the statements or actions. All very simple,
all very well-handled. I'd argue our failing here is not in not having
a mechanism for illegal harassment, but simply a greater societal
issue; internet harassment is, while a crime, something with few
benefits for the police to prosecute. We can't solve for that; we
could reduce the barrier a bit by cutting out the middle man and being
able to provide the police with the real-world identity of
contributors, sure, but again, that's going to be a ton of work.