I stumbled across this last night. It’s a guide to trolling on newsgroups for fun.
So how do we know when a troll is just messing with us, or if it’s really trolling?
If the troll replies to the thread in an attempt to defend the position, he/she is probably serious. Hit and run trolls do not have the conviction of their beliefs and are probably not serious.
Sometimes, I don’t reply to a thread I started because the response was overwhelmingly against me. I don’t want to argue with 10 people at a time. It’s like banging my head against the wall.
Also, some debates detoriate to a back and forth:
I’m right, you’re wrong.
No you’re wrong, I’m right.
etc.
I see no point in responding to those.
A little ironic seeing you post on this thread Curious George, the monkey king of cut and paste drive by’s.
Somebody has a website teaching people how to be a-holes. Just great. 
Is there such a shortage of a-holes that we have to create new ones?
Yup. Dire shortage. Apparently, they’ve been issuing a-holes one to a person, assuming that would be enough. Then some people decided not to display theirs for all the world to see, so a program to add additional a-holes has been initiated.
Well since there are sites that teach people how to hate people based on skin color or religious preference, and sites that teach people how to physically hurt people, this site dosen’t seem so bad.
If you feed the troll suspects, they’ll return for sure. If you don’t feed the troll suspects, and they still come back for more, then you know they’re for real.
I’m confused. In America, do you call a boat that drags a net for fish a “troller” or a “trawler”? Because we call it the latter, so clearly the entire troll problem is caused by some spelling reformer not RESPECTING OUR AUTHORITAH. Be kinda hard to get a decent noun out of “trawler”, though…
Anyhoo, I find this interesting. I don’t approve of trolls, because while the message boards they ruin may very well be totally trivial, they do matter to the folks who use them and it’s childish and unhelpful to deliberately bug people who won’t see a funny side. That said, I started a thread a long time ago about the psychology of message boards - where and who we are when we’re online, and so forth. I never thought of asking about trolls. Maybe that’s why I only got about three responses.
trolling - trailing a baited line behind a boat in hopes that the fish will bite
trawling - trailing a net behind a boat to capture everything in its path
With that post count I’d say you have a very short break 
[sub]before you come back and explain I know you where talking about other MB’s[/sub]
I have never come across a troll, but I’d wager I would take him seriously, especially if he threatended to eat me.
Riiight. And I bet you didn’t notice that you were the subject of this sentence- “The shut-ins who haunt message boards think they are chat rooms.”