This is not a rant about trolls, because it goes without saying that they are dickheads and no-one needs me to describe how much like slime they are. No, this rant is about the people who continually reply to them, and have NO way of being contacted. (to tell them to stop etc…)
There’s a guy who calls himself “Bill McFuckPants”. He is not just a troll, he’s the self-proclaimed king of trolls. He changes his e-mail address almost every day so that he never stays killfiled.
The residents of the newsgroup in which he trolls got to ‘know’ him so well that we knew the only way to deal with him was to never reply to him. Most of us manage this, except one guy. Known as TeHawk. This guy takes every single bit of bait that Bill leaves. And we end up with threads so huge that they appear in our newsgroup anyway (because of the likelyhood that non-killfiled people will be more likely to have replied to a bigger thread).
TeHawk’s posting is all Bill needs. Bill wants people to reply. and TeHawk gives him what he wants. If TeHawk would SHUT THE FUCK UP GULLIBLE WANKER then Bill would have no replies at all and eventually he would get bored. (It would take an extremely sad person, infinately sadder than the textbook troll, to keep posting long after people stopped replying to him)
On another note. How easy is it to set up a forum like this one online? It would be great If I could host one and kick out people I don’t like.
On a related note, there are newsreaders available that can killfile a person based upon more than their e-mail address. Most trolls aren’t aware of this, so they just change their email address hoping everyone is using OE.
The point was not that his posts make Bills appear in the ng. I have killfiled TeHawk anyway.
The point was that weither TeHawk is a troll or not, he is keeping bill ‘alive’.
If Bill died off then we wouldn’t have to killfile him every time he changed his name because he wouldn’t post at all.
I am all for solving problems rather than developing workarounds for them.
Interestingly (or perhaps boringly) I am a programmer There are programmers who write workarounds for bugs. And there are programmers who eliminate bugs. I am most definately one of the latter. same applies to other problems I encounter in my life. ts almost an idiosyncrasy - If I develop a work around I am always aware that the problem is still there.
I don’t want to ignore trolls. I want to get rid of them.
Thanks for trying. you may find this amazing but I actually like OE because of a few very useful features (useful to me anyway)…
You can batch download. In other words you can set one (or more) post to download while you look at another one. Or you can set many many posts off downloading while you do something else. This is specially good for downloading binaries.
Thread relation is easy to see. It is shown like a tree. Replies become branches of the exact post they are replies of.
And I use it for my e-mail.
And it’s free.
I guess until I can be bothered to switch to another newsreader I am stuck with killfiling these people every time they change their name.
There is also the factor that the newsgroups are almost always boring and superficial. So I am not sure if it would be worth pursuing a new reader.
Other readers do the same thing, are free, and take up both less disk space and memory.
I use one program for email, and one for usenet. Both are text only, and the two together when running at the same time use less disk space and resources than OE. Plus they avoid the dumb HTML idiots on usenet and the email spammers that use weird characters (makes it real easy to do a massive delete w/o looking at the messages). YMMV
You said you want to eliminate the trolls. Ain’t gonna happen unless you hunt them down and kill them.
You also said you want to solve the problem using software. I told you how to do that. You said you don’t want to do it that way. ::SHRUG::
You also said you want to solve the problem using software. I told you how to do that. You said you don’t want to do it that way. ::SHRUG:: **
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I’ve downloaded the Agent program that Fenris recomended, and may purchase it. (thanks Fenris)
Whatever it takes.
I think you misunderstood me. I talked about software because I was using it as an analogy for solving problems instead of hiding them from view. As I said I have downloaded agent and may purchase it (I am at work at the mo so I can’t try it yet)
Anyway. This was a rant. rants are rhetorical. (but thanks for trying to help. I apreciate it)
Snitz forum is the one we use on our private board. It’s nearly as good as this one, and when I say nearly, I mean, so darn close that you’d be hard pressed to find too many differences. Not only that, it’s free (donation-based). http://forum.snitz.com/