A thread for naming and shaming the people who should damn well know better but continue to engage with the trolls.
Let’s just start with a recent case. In a thread about how shitty things have gotten due to the non-stop trolling, one of the board’s most obvious and least worthwhile trolls, LAZombie, said something. I have him on ignore, so I shouldn’t have to read it, but…
Fuck you, iiandyiiii. You should know better. You literally say as much. He’s a troll who offers nothing beneficial to this board. Why are you responding?
Then, a few posts later:
I think most of us get that octopus is a waste of space. Why are you quoting him?
What does this accomplish? Is this informing the moderators that obvious troll is obvious? Or is it just showing a whole bunch of people who have this asshole on ignore what he posted anyways? You people have no business engaging with these idiots unless it’s to highlight a particularly noxious piece of shit with the help of the report button. Quoting them does not help. You’re just feeding the troll. You should know better. Stop doing it.
Look, here’s the thing. Some people on this board are obviously bad-faith trolls. They aren’t going to stop posting, and nobody is going to stop them from posting. The best and only option available is to not engage. Do not feed the troll. Put them on ignore. If you absolutely cannot stand to put people on ignore, for the love of god do not quote them or respond to them, so that the people who do have them on ignore don’t see that shit. Starve them out. Make it so that every post is them shouting into the void. Whether they quit or not at that point doesn’t matter, because everyone with half a brain will already be ignoring their posts.
(In fact, there’s even a script to make it so that the stubs showing that they posted something disappear. Might be worth using; I’ve never used greasemonkey so I wouldn’t know.)
Any other form of engagement is a waste of time. You guys know this. You say as much in your posts. We should probably start acting like it.
Shodan trolls a thread about Clinton deaths, and this guy can’t help but respond.
Here’s one responding to the king of trolls, WillF.
My takeaway from this is that maybe it’s a little harder than it sounds. A troll post to one person is an argument to another. Maybe we could focus on the trolls and not blame people who get sucked in?
I’m sympathetic BPC. The truth is that we all get sucked in sometimes. It’s very, very hard not to respond when trolls are so very, very wrong, and nasty, and mean spirited, and stupid, and so on.
I’m trying not to respond when a response will make the thread about their agenda. If it’s their Pit thread and someone wants to argue, fine. If it’s an election thread, I try to scroll on by and engage with posters who actually want a dialogue.
BPC, seriously, step away from the keyboard for awhile and go outside or something. Watch some television, go to a movie, go out to dinner. Nothing is worth getting that worked up over.
Modern trolls are well adapted to a basic idea like “ignoring them”. Quit saying this like it’s some amazing plan. It stopped working decades ago gramps.
BPC, dude, if you do a search on your threads, for the last few months, almost ALL of them have been in the Pit. You’re either going to get banned, or have a stroke.
I look at it this way: I can’t yell at Trump in person, so I’ll settle for one of his asshole braindead followers. Just use PgDn if you don’t want to read it.
In that case the trolls are doing you a favor. Even if they’re not really Trumpists and are just yanking your chain, they’re creating a target dummy for you to vent your frustrations against.
