An anonymous message forum has become a highly-trafficked website where individuals in my small community make odious slurs and slanders against other individuals in the community. The level of activity and viciousness of the comments have become a major problem.

Members of the community have tried to address this several ways, including with legal action against the forum operator (it is a private, niche domain). But this has failed and both the operator and forum participants are anonymous and operate with impunity. The general sense is that nothing can be done, and we just have to live with it.

But I wanted to ask whether it is possible and legal to flood the forum with anodyne messages or forum spam, for example, by having many users (or bots) post random messages sampled from words or names drawn from the existing website or broader community. Today the website is powerful because it singles out selective individuals for abuse. But if, instead, it had random messages about everyone, or if when you search for people it produced a long list of mostly non-informative junk, it would be less effective at injuring people and less useful to the trolls. (The community is sufficiently small this is plausible.) The website has no terms of use to violate. I’d be glad if the owner sued me to stop and revealed himself. But I’d be interested in feedback about the legality and ethics of this, and, if it is legal, whether and how people organize something like this? More generally, what do people do about this kind of behavior (if anything)? Many thanks.