My leap year baby turned 36 a few days ago, or nine. He has never seen me drink, and he’s never been endangered by my alcoholism.
My zoom meeting has elected me co-chair of the Rule #62 committee. We have at least two trolls. Troll #1 is a Big Book Thumper who constantly tries to tell us how we’re doing it wrong. OK, he thinks so. But he also send nasty nasty individual chats to people who are struggling.
Troll #2 prefers to remain anonymous, and changes his/her/their name every meeting. This troll openly and individually picks on people in the chat, at least once threatening to “talk to” a member’s 13 year old daughter.
I am so sad that because of these people, we may have to disable chat. I love the chat feature of zoom meetings, and I think it adds a really nice layer that you can’t get in person. I know that some people find it distracting and they are free to not open it, not look at it. But good people use it to post announcements that don’t take up meeting time, post background information on the topic at hand, and send nice individual messages that everyone doesn’t need to see.
I’m sad about this. It also intrigues me a little, wondering how many people are sitting in in-person meeting with me criticizing and silently snarking on the people present. Troll #2 sits through years of meetings to strike at the end. Very strange. I amy set off to google a little to see if anything else can be done.
Don't Drink and Don't Die 
I am a ham radio operator. During Covid several national ham radio conferences were held on Zoom. During the first there were some trolls making highly disturbing comments. So the administrators selected a few of us and asked if we would be willing to be on a “troll patrol” team. They made us administrators, and had meetings with us prior to the conference to determine appropriate actions to take, guiding us by using actual examples of trolling during that first Zoom Conference. We had options within the Zoom admin. framework… we could warn the troll, we could remove certain chats made by the troll, and if/when all else failed, we could prevent the troll from using chat. Although it felt like a big responsibility and took away from my ability to follow the meeting presentations, I felt like it was a definite benefit to the whole feeling and experience of the conference for all of the participants, and a relief for the moderators. I don’t know if this might be a helpful solution for you, with just a relatively small group. But for a big conference with 100s of participants, it worked well.
I am a ham radio operator. During Covid there were several national ham radio conferences held on Zoom. The first one was plagued by some trolls making frequent and highly disturbing comments in chat. The Conference administrators asked a few of us to be on a “troll patrol” team. They made us administrators and trained us, using the actual troll comments made at the first conference, to monitor the chat. We could notify the troll and ask them to stop, or simply remove a disturbing comment, or close the chat function for the troll. Although constantly monitoring every chat made it difficult (actually impossible) for me to follow the conference presentations, I was able, later, to watch the recordings. Asking trolls to stop worked better than I thought it would, but we did have to close chat for a few of them. We made that decision as a team. It was a huge help for the conference administrators, and I believe made conference participation more relaxed and enjoyable for all the attendees (100s of them). This approach might not work for a small group, but I am writing about it, hoping it might be useful in some way.
Thank you so much! Unfortunately, the troll changes names every time, so by the time we can eject that person, they’ve already attacked.