Omnibus Trolls R Us Thread
 

For the Obvious Troll is Obvious award of the week, I'd like to nominate GlowingDarkness, in recognition of these fine efforts:

Do Nice Guys Ever Get the Sexy Time?

Why Do Drug Addicts Get All Addicted?

Christ Almighty, It was Only the One Rape!

Why Be People Sheeple?

I Met Her in a Club Down in Old Soho Where You Drink Champagne and It Tastes Just Like Cherry Cola

Okay, maybe they aren't all trolling threads. But overall it's an outstanding body of work. And these are only about half of the threads he's started recently.

(I realize that I may be the only person interested in an omnibus troll thread in the Pit. Hell, even I feel pretty half-hearted about the whole thing.)

And of course, this is definitely NOT a troll thread. :dubious:

You are correct. It is not a troll thread. It may be a stupid thread, of course.

Total posts = 56
Threads started = 42

I think that says it all.

What do you guys think? ;)

He's challenging boffking.

You read my mind!

There's a certain kind of trolling that is indistinguishable from mental illness. And I don't mean just that you cannot tell intent from the posts. I mean that if you actually got an honest interview with the poster, even if they subjectively thought they were a mentally balanced person trolling as a lark, in actuality they would have some kind of diagnosable mental illness.

I'm much less troubled by "trolls" who are obvious. It's the trolls who make an effort to hide below the radar and just selectively stir shit up or profess some insincere bullshit for fun that I think are annoying, since part of the value of the board is interacting with posters' actual beliefs.

Here's another one pinging my trolldar.

New member. May 2016
Typical trollish "personal dilema" thread as their first post.
Passive aggressive response style.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=793737

A definitive ping. Hmmm, how can I say something asinine about the military and Christianity at the same time? Eureka!

(= .75) I think that's an excellent metric in general. It should appear next to one's post count. (And why not--they should call it the John Mace quotient, because you're the first to apply it, at least IME.)

Someone should pit spamforbrains. I don't believe any poster has ever been more consistently wrong than her. Bonus points for smugness too.

An addition to the collection:

Why don't people like pedophiles and wife beaters?

But points for an accurate user name!

I was amazed when she claimed to have a Ph.D., too.

If you click on the Nice Guys thread, you get a twofer. GlowingD's cluelessness and CCitizen, who (despite being repeatedly told it's bullshit) keeps stating variations of:

Which is exactly why I like the idea of an omnibus thread for the obvious ones. You get a little mad, but not mad enough for a full pit thread.

I believe adaher and spamforrains may be soul mates.

CCitizen is either a troll with a long game or a record on auto-replay. Hard to tell. Update music reference as appropriate.

Spamforbrains doesn't set off my troll-dar. Rings my WTF-dar all the time though.

And yet another entry Are blacks really screwing up Africa?

That was the one that did it for me. :D

So you're sure that it's not just that these people are idiots.

I must be charitable. I think idiots first, trolls second.

Where do you put artificial intelligence chat bots in your hierarchy?

Socks sake, cover your ankles.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...84&postcount=3

I seem to be a magnet for students 'on the spectrum', and some of them have so little 'verbal socialization*' that they'd be indistinct from chatbots. In fact, looking through CCitizen's posts, he does ask a question relating to how an autistic person communicates.


*"Okay, I've compiled a list of all the ways that chimeras are superior to gryphons and don't even get me started on hippogriffs no this is a whole new list because it's on graph paper this time and I know you told me not to interrupt class to share these with everyone but look at the graph paper so this would require a different ruling from the bench and I KNOW this is the middle of class oh you're at the board in the middle of diagramming something but number 17 is flight because I should tell everyone in the school this one because a gryphon can fly techhhhnically but the wingspan would need to be immense because of the heavy muscular torso okay I'll sit down but I'll try to pass this list to all the popular kids and I'll have to get up to give it to Jessie Jablonski who always sits over by the windows WOO HOO graph paper rules! In your face, three hole punched college ruled!"

Actually, there's a third class too. Those whose posts contain more Broomfiction than fact. They aren't trolling as much as using their Broomagination to create Broomtales. Of course, I'd never mention who that poster was. The point is, this trolling isn't offensive or obnoxious so we sort of give them a pass on it.

Slightly above 133+speakers but just below there's this girl who goes to my church and every time I go to talk to her she avoids me, and when I tried to ask her why on Facebook she blocked me. I'm the only one she does this to, because there's a whole group of girls from my church who get together after church every week for sushi and she invited all of them to her wedding in the park except me, and when I tried to ask her why on Facebook she blocked me after posting a nasty message about how I lied about liking sushi. Why would I lie about liking sushi? Also the barrista at Starbucks wouldn't give me a refund on my venti soy chestnut latte because all the sprinkles sank to the bottom so I thought I didn't get any after I asked for them special.

You're done.

Oh, how tempting to post that in one of the other forums. So tempting!! :)

Our troll in the OP has now hit the jackpot with this:

If Europeans had settled in Africa, would they have done a better job than current Africans?

Just asking questions!!

Does he ever return to his own threads?

Not being a fan of the GlowingDarkness oeuvre, I can't say, but surely with such an awesome thread-to-post ratio -- noted above as being 0.75 (sometimes known as the John Mace Quotient in honor of its inventor) -- our luminescent friend apparently wastes little time posting either in his own threads or anyone else's, and merely busies himself starting threads, somewhat like a write-only trollbot. To add to the magnificent collection already cited, the latest write-only achievement in philosophical rumination is "why is pain painful?" an inquiry that I can only imagine was inspired by how we all feel when reading his magnificently abundant threads.

But no, he's not challenging boffking, he is head and shoulders above boffking, who with 451 threads and 1252 posts has a relatively lowly JMQ of just 0.36. But to give boffking credit, most of those posts are in other people's threads. Like the inimitable GlowingDarkness, he has very little interest in his own work. Perhaps it's a form of artistic modesty.

A few weeks ago, I looked at his last 100 threads he started.

100 threads
24 he returned to for a total of 37 extra posts. (beyond the OP)

His best was 5 extra posts in one thread but he also had a thread he never returned to that had 420 replies.

I think boffking had quite a few posts years ago then a blank period. And then returned recently in his latest incarnation. So a more accurate look at the latter might produce a different mathematical result.

Posting from my phone right now so I'm not really in a position to check that.

Perhaps a new metric is needed: # threads never returned to (TNRT) over total threads started (TTS).

Boffking returned to a few threads that apparently he was very passionate about (ignoring any questions or corrections to his scattered OPs) while leaving orphan the majority of his JAQ threads.

A worthy refinement! :)

Time to get a hobby or maybe a pet. ;)

We have pets.
This is a hobby.

Ah, come on, amusing oneself with self-made petty statistics has always been a regular pastime for at least 63 percent of dopers.;)

Actually, there was a thread where several were complaining about his lack of participation and in a fit of idle curiosity, I took a look to see if it was a valid complaint.

63.4875% actually.

Sorry, it wasn't meant as a shot at you, just a general quip :).

The statistics were interesting, thanks!

Oh dear God.

Anyone want to bet on what's next? Circumcision? Declawing your cats? Another troll did that recently. Do Spoilers Really Ruin Game of Thrones?

This is the one that caught my eye. At what point do we (meaning the PTB) pull the plug?

bolding mine

Now look what you've done. Heads are spinning like tops. ;)

Yep, one mention of spoilers and then it's Katie hold the door.

It's "Katie bar the door". Which is to say, I see what you did there. And so did Baby Jesus. If I get to Hell first, I'll save you a spot.

Hanson's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Yeah, there are trolls that purposely try and tweak people, and then there are the idiots who find a button and see that pushing the button makes the puppets dance. Then they try another button and see that the puppets dance again. And then on to the next button...

Trolling is one example where that doesn't really work--since the trolls have every reason to try and hide that way.

Hell, that's the entire modus operandi of a rather famous professional troll that I saw featured not long ago.

We need more trolls like him.

He's back.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=794036

12 beers and 7 hot dogs later, he waddles over to his computer and found the bookmark for the SDMB.

That is some pretty damn funny shit right there! SDMB could use some trolls like that.