Trolls 101

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

What with the topic of “trolls” emerging now and again on these boards—not to mention the trolls themselves—it has occurred to me that a group effort to develop a Basic Troll Theory may be helpful to educate the masses.

Okay, I’ll go first. Here are some truths about trolls:

  1. Trolls may be found everywhere—on these boards and at large in your own familiar "real world "stomping grounds. I am convinced that the board-trolls and the real-world-trolls are one and the same.

There is a wide variety of troll types. In the real world, I often see vehicle-trolls weaving in and out of traffic in their sporty cars, while obnoxious music reverberates from inside. This, I believe, is proof that, even with the wide availability of easy credit, you still cannot buy brains.

On these boards, trolls also weave in and out of traffic, while making their noise, and again, prove to us all that it takes little intelligence to own a piece of machinery (in this case, a computer).

  1. The annoying thing about trolls is their sheer ignorance. They are not only innately stupid, but they have no grasp of the depth of their own stupidity. Trolls are easily impressed and impress themselves enormously. They assume that others are equally as impressed, even when all evidence points to the contrary.

Many folks may appear to be troll-like, or pseudo-trolls, when excited or confused or temporarily delusional. Let’s face it, we all have our “troll moments”. These are easily discerned by subsequent corrections, apologies, or intelligent posts. A genuine troll becomes stimulated by any attention—even sneers and stinkbombs—and proceeds to intensify his/her trollification. (See ‘easily impressed’, above).

  1. Some people have sensitive, built-in troll-detectors. They could sniff out a troll from a pile of dead fish. These are handy people to know, and we would be wise to leave offerings of fresh fruit at their feet. The rest of us may be easily duped into responding to a troll’s bait, but no matter—in time, the troll will always let us know s/he is truly a troll. It’s his/her nature.

Please do not hesitate to add any further wisdom.

2

you seem relatively new here, are you a troll in doper’s skin? teeming doper millions go get the imposter…attack…attack…attack

3

I wasn’t aware there was a difference!

4

a-HEM
Dark chocolate and cold Stoli, if you please.

StoryTyler
“Not everybody does it, but everybody should.”

5

This looks like a good place to post this advice.

Do Not Feed The Trolls. DNFTT. What does that mean? As said, they are easily impressed and think any mention of them or any attention, even negative, is a good thing. Thus giving them attention is what they want. The goal is to disrupt and focus all attention on them and their activities.

So how does one not feed trolls? After identification of said troll, ignore ALL posts by said troll. Don’t even bother to read the threads started by the troll. If he makes a comment in another thread, IGNORE IT. Pretend it didn’t happen. Look right past it. No matter how he trips your peeve meter.

Especially, do not post to a troll’s thread. We have had several responses to them that involve hate mail, blank posts, hijacking the topic, etc. All are bad responses. Why? They all feed the troll. They all focus attention on disrupting us from doing our thing. Also, every time you respond to a troll’s thread, you bump it to the top. That means that anyone else who loads the page after you sees that thread and troll’s name. Most people start at the top of page one and work their way down. Since it takes time to read the threads, we get as far as we can before our available time runs out. I rarely get to page 2. So if you bump troll threads to the top of page one, you push interesting and worthwhile threads to page 2 where we’ll never see them and innundate us with the troll’s threads we want to ignore.

So do not post to a troll’s thread. Ignore it. Go about your business, not the troll’s. Then there’s no need to start a dozen separate hate threads about 1 troll (I’m not exaggerating), because you aren’t being irritated - you’re skipping anything that troll says or does. You are much less likely to get riled if you don’t interact. And don’t peeve off the rest of us by feeding the troll, and thereby luring it back.

If you really must vent about said troll, do so in the PIT. That is the proper forum for venting.

Now that we’ve cleared up what not to do, how do you recognize a troll? This is especially important since many troll-like behaviors are seen by regulars and perfectly acceptable. How do you tell the difference?

  1. Rude behavior. Especially failure to apologize and modify behavior after being informed of rudeness.
  2. Deliberate posting of offensive topics, questions designed to annoy, purposely picking known flash points.
  3. Posting to start fights. (Not GD, and BBQ Pit Excluded.)
  4. Malicious thread hijacking.

I’ll stop now and let others add things to the list.