I don’t know that there’s anything I can add on the subject of altering quotes. You edited the posts so it looked like Budget Cadet Player was insulting himself. Editing a quote to change the meaning like that, even as a joke or when labelled as such, is against the rules. That’s not a new or obscure rule, and you’ve been around long enough to know it. If this is something you’ve been doing for “years,” you should have a lot more warnings than you do right now, so consider yourself lucky in that regard.
As for the question trolling in the Pit. Here’s the board rule about trolling:
Pretty straightforward for most of the board. In the Pit, though? The Pit was created specifically so that posters could have a place to go to get in fights with each other. The basic function of the forum necessitates a looser enforcement of the rule against trolling, else every third post in there would be drawing a warning.
That’s not the same as saying that trolling is “allowed.” It’s just that it’s a higher bar to clear. If you’re misrepresenting yourself in someway, for example, then you can still be banned for trolling. One poster was banned for claiming (in a Pit thread, I’m pretty sure) that his parents had died at the WTC, but someone turned up an older (but still post-9/11) thread where he’d talked about them being alive. We’ve had the occasional poster take, say, a hard-line anti-gay stance for three or four pages, then turn around and say he didn’t really believe any of it, he just wanted to see how people react. That’s still trolling.
But in the post in question, Clothahump’s basically confessing to using the Pit for its intended purpose: he likes fighting with liberals, he perceives himself to be good at it, and so enjoys the idea that he makes many liberals upset. Enjoying the Pit, and being good at Pitting people, aren’t against the Pit rules.
I’d like to add that I don’t think there’s a single regular conservative poster on this board who hasn’t had a Pit post reported as a “confession” of trolling. There’s a widespread inability among some Dopers to tell the difference between “being trolled” and “losing a fight.”