In short, you try to make it not worth the cyberstalker's (or troll, spammer, etc.) while. No matter how many protections you put up, if you make your service available to the public, people will be able to register and harass other users. So, firstly you make it harder for them to do this (to a degree). Some methods include:
1. Verified accounts - e.g. a confirmation email.
2. Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) - obvious caveat being, some people don't have them, or won't want to sign up with them, etc.
Then, you make it harder for the cyberstalker to determine they've been banned. "Hellbanning" is a good example of this - you ban the user, but don't notify them. Everyone else just doesn't see the comment. There are variations, but the idea is to make it harder for the person on the other end of the screen to determine when to switch accounts.
Thirdly, you implement some sort of user control. For example, an "ignore" button - press this, and suddenly that user's comments aren't visible to you any more. Without notifying them, of course. Alternatively, let the project owner hellban/ignore any user from their project.
And then there's the other stuff - community moderation like Reddit and HN, automatic spam filtering, disallowing registrations from throwaway emails like Mailinator, and other stuff like that.
No matter what they implement, "please go away because you're being stalked" is NOT the right choice. There are technical solutions to this kind of thing, and if they're not perfect, they're certainly better than nothing. And at the end of the day, it's not about being perfect, it's about making the person that's sitting on the other end of the screen not want to spend the time to harass you, or post spam, or troll, or whatever else.
1. Verified accounts - e.g. a confirmation email.
2. Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) - obvious caveat being, some people don't have them, or won't want to sign up with them, etc.
Then, you make it harder for the cyberstalker to determine they've been banned. "Hellbanning" is a good example of this - you ban the user, but don't notify them. Everyone else just doesn't see the comment. There are variations, but the idea is to make it harder for the person on the other end of the screen to determine when to switch accounts.
Thirdly, you implement some sort of user control. For example, an "ignore" button - press this, and suddenly that user's comments aren't visible to you any more. Without notifying them, of course. Alternatively, let the project owner hellban/ignore any user from their project.
And then there's the other stuff - community moderation like Reddit and HN, automatic spam filtering, disallowing registrations from throwaway emails like Mailinator, and other stuff like that.
No matter what they implement, "please go away because you're being stalked" is NOT the right choice. There are technical solutions to this kind of thing, and if they're not perfect, they're certainly better than nothing. And at the end of the day, it's not about being perfect, it's about making the person that's sitting on the other end of the screen not want to spend the time to harass you, or post spam, or troll, or whatever else.