Most, well know my abhorrence of the Troll, hence:

1. Distance;

People will say things in anonymous forums that they'd never dare say to someone's face, just as they'll do things in cars that they'd never do as pedestrians—like tailgate people, or honk at them, or cut them off.

2.Hackers;

Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse.

3.Incompetence;

If you disagree with something, it's easier to say "you suck" than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation.

4.Culture;

The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trolls are like children (many are children) in that they're capable of a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. In a place where rudeness isn't tolerated, most can be polite. But vice versa as well.

O.K what do you guys think?

Moss

Can a mod please put an additional l in collective for me please.

Cheers

Moss

I think they are there to eat little billie goats that stray too far away from the herd. mmmmaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Hey how come I only get one vote? I just thought of another answer and I want another vote to go with it.

How can I have only one vote if I've got more than one answer? What is this a Communist totalitarian dictatorship?

Anyone want to trade their vote for half abottle of potato vodka?

<deleted> I'm not going to tell you the other answer now, and I think you would have liked it.

Fascists.

Voted: other.

Having had a lot of experience of various types of troll, I'd say many are in it for the reaction of others. The most 'successful' trolls will get people worked up & arguing amongst themselves, with the minimum of posts from themselves. I guess an analogy would be to light the touchpaper & sit back to enjoy the fireworks (this obviously only applies to forum trolls).

Some are very skilled at this. I thought Weho was an excellent troll & very funny with it. Some are far too blatant, so don't get the response they want from the people they want to involve.

Can a mod please put an additional l in collective for me please.

Cheers

Moss

Done, interesting topic - I will post a reply soon that I hope will be of interest

CB

I voted 'Other'.Trolls are individuals with social dysfunctional behaviour who crave attention.The only way to get this is by <deleted> stirring others on furums.The anonymous nature of the internet allows them to reincarnate themselves with a new identity if banned and who knows how many trolls have many IDs already?Sad lot of individuals,best ignored.

Hey how come I only get one vote? I just thought of another answer and I want another vote to go with it.

How can I have only one vote if I've got more than one answer? What is this a Communist totalitarian dictatorship?

Anyone want to trade their vote for half abottle of potato vodka?

<deleted> I'm not going to tell you the other answer now, and I think you would have liked it.

Fascists.

Oh Robski! You are on a roll man!

I think trolls come in various guises.

I voted Distance, as per your description, I feel that this covers a larger majority.

Although there are other forms of them.

Apparently they turn to stone if caught out in the daylight.

I voted 'Other'.Trolls are individuals with social dysfunctional behaviour who crave attention.The only way to get this is by <deleted> stirring others on furums.The anonymous nature of the internet allows them to reincarnate themselves with a new identity if banned and who knows how many trolls have many IDs already?Sad lot of individuals,best ignored.

A good analogy Momo. I also voted 'other'.

I was sent this by a member who I had just given a short leave of absence for a troll attempt (imo). It makes some interesting reading:

CB

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There are some individuals out there who don't just enjoy winding up people on newsgroups and bulletin boards - it's their sad lifestyle choice! Using every known disruptive trick in the book, these troublesome types don't go out to the pub, meet members of the opposite sex or enjoy life. They spend their time hunched over their computers trolling.

Here's how they work: (Not me. I hunch over the computer after a night out doing the above things)

INTRODUCTION

The object of this post is to bring together a definitive document to cover the phenomena of the Usenet Troll. To many a troll is nothing more than an annoying method of defeating the killfile whereas to the heavily killfiled, trolling can be a virtual Godsend. (obviously not mine?)

What I want this document to focus on is how to create entertaining trolls. I have drawn on the expertise of the writer's of some of Usenet's finest and best remembered trolls. Trolls are for fun. The object of recreational trolling is to sit back and laugh at all those gullible idiots that will believe *anything*. (Dont think anybody would of beleaved my troll?)

Section 1: What Is A Troll?

The WWW gives this as a definition:

troll v.,n. To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies"; which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling";, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. (Thats me, a newbie)

The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll.

If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

The following extract is from a broader expansion of the defining comments given above:

In Usenet usage, a troll is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers-by, but rather a provocative posting to a newsgroup intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses.

The content of a "troll posting generally falls into several areas. It may consist of an apparently foolish contradiction of common knowledge, a deliberately offensive insult to the readers of a newsgroup, or a broad request for trivial follow-up postings.

There are three reasons why people troll newsgroups:

People post such messages to get attention, to disrupt newsgroups, and simply to make trouble.

Career trollers tend for the latter two whilst the former is the mark of the clueless newbie and should be ignored.

Section 2: Design Issues

A troll is no different to any other Usenet posting. That needs to be stressed.

Any article that you decide to write should be written with a view to it actually being read by large numbers of people. Simply X-posting to large numbers of irrelevant newsgroups is not creative trolling - it is just spam and should be avoided.

The experienced troller spends time carefully choosing the right subject and delivering it to the right newsgroup. With trolls, delivery is just as important as the subject.

Start the troll in a reasonable and erudite manner. You have to engage your readers' interest and draw them in.

Never give too much away at the start - although a brief abstract with hints of what's to come can work wonders.

Construct your troll in a manner to make it readable. Use short paragraphs and lots of white space. Keep line length below eighty characters. Use a liberal amount of emphasis and even the occasional illustration.

A good rule of thumb is that as your troll becomes more and more ludicrous put extra effort into the presentation - this keeps the mug punter confused. Let confusion and chaos be your goal

Section 3: Content

Make your subject a relevant one. Posting "Star Trek Sucks" into hk.forsale is not going to work very well and is liable to utterly destroy your hard earned reputation as a troller overnight.

You do not have to make the subject clear. Trolls are aimed at two audiences, the respondees and the lurkers.

The best trolls reveal their true subject only to the lurkers. In every sense those who reply to your troll are your tools. So choose a theme for your troll and stick to it.

Outwardly you need to appear sincere, but at the same time you have to tell your *real* audience that this is blatant flamebait. Your skill is shown in the easy way that you manipulate large areas of the Usenet community into making public fools of themselves.

Section 4: Newsgroup Selection

Choice of newsgroup is as important as the subject, tone and structure of the troll. You want to appeal to each group you X-post into to ensure responses from each group.

A well delivered troll will anticipate what those responses will be and thus ensure that contradictions will arise amongst the different groups that you are setting up.

BAD:

Posting "USA Sucks" to alt.nuke.the.USA, alt.usa-sucks, aus.flame.usa

This is totally on-topic and obvious. A truly useless troll.

AVERAGE:

Posting "God Doesn't Exist" to all the alt.religion newsgroups

Here you are being too obvious. People recognise this sort of trouble making and have usually learned not to respond to it. However, if your troll is well written you can actually entrap a lot of newbies.

This, if executed correctly, can be exploited to cause great offence to those more experienced troll avoiders on the groups you are attacking. Go for it!

GOOD:

Posting an article that appears relevant to every group but with no connection between those groups other than the fact that you've just trolled them.

The best trolls go out to an average of around eight or nine newsgroups. This will stop them from becoming spam as it's not quite enough to be a real problem. However, to get by on so few groups you have to include a couple of popular ones in the list.

When posting to say seven groups you should try to break down your theme into seven areas - each of which will be of specific interest to just one of those groups.

You then write an eight paragraph troll with a paragraph for each group and a spare one for yourself with which to lob in a gratuitous insult to everyone who was dumb enough to read your troll.

It is a matter of choice whether you choose newsgroups before or after writing the troll.

Some experts claim that newsgroup selection is the key to successful trolling and should be done first, others will write general trolls and then apply the standard Perl script that trollers use for Automatic Random Newsgroup Selection.

Section 5: Know Your Audience

Remember that you have two audiences. The people who are going to get the maximum enjoyment out of your post are other trollers. You need to keep in contact with them through both your troll itself and the way you direct its effect.

It is trollers that you are trying to entertain so be creative - trollers don't just want a laugh from you they want to see good trolls so that they can also learn how to improve their own in the never ending search for the perfect troll.

The other audience is of course the little people in those newsgroups that your are attacking. Get to know them. Every newsgroup has its smartarse who will expose your troll if given half a chance.

Research your targets and learn what their arguments are. Then avoid those arguments like the plague.

Drag them off-topic - the further off-topic the better. Remember, you are trying to waste their time.

Never take sides - remember that your goal is not to win an argument, rather it is to provoke a futile one that runs forever.

If, for example you were attacking Fast Food then you should also X-post to Healthy Eating groups, Environmental Protection Groups, Animal Rights Groups etc....

You want to try to ensure that you have the broadest possible range of opinions as this is the easiest way to sow confusion.

The more confusion the less the likelihood of your troll being exposed for what it is.

It can also be shown that the inclusion of just one totally off-topic newsgroup can have dramatic effects.

The list above is taken from a genuine troll which also included an Artificial Intelligence group, the result of which was to draw Computer Guru Professor Marvin Minsky into a flamewar concerning Ronald McDonald's exploitation of the disabled - an all-time classic piece of trolling - written by a practising veggie.

Section 6: Following-Up

"Even if this is true......"

That represents the perfect response to any troll. The mark of a gullible lunatic that will almost certainly believe anything you tell them. A total group embarrassment. Award yourself a Troll Gold Star every time you get one!

Other good responses include, but are not limited to....

"Although this is on-topic....."

"I disagree...."

"Yes, but....."

"Can you provide a source for this...."

Try not to follow-up to your own troll. The troll itself quickly becomes forgotten in the chaos and if you just sit back you can avoid being blamed for causing it.

Remember, if you do follow up you are talking to an idiot. Treat them with the ill-respect they deserve.

You should also learn to recognise follow-ups from your fellow trollers. Sometimes an average troll can be elevated into majestic proportions when several trollers spontaneously join forces via the medium of the follow up troll.

Ignore cries of wasted bandwidth! This is pure drivel that will always be posted by the anti-troll lobby.

These jerks fail to understand that trolls are the best way to drive people off the internet thus making available multi-mbs for the rest of us to download our porn.

Section 7: The Successful Troll

A good example of troll success is the famous "How I Envy American Students" troll.

This troll was written by an English brick-layer posing as an American student. He correctly posted it to all the college news- groups and then left American students to do all the work spreading it.

His troll ran for over a year, it is known to have generated in excess of 3,500 responses (an average of 1 response every 160 minutes for a whole year) and the greatest coup of all was when an innocent american student lost not only her internet account but was also expelled from high school for abuse of the computer systems.

Somehow she had managed to get the blame for causing the troll.

Weird.

The fact that so much can be written about such an abhorrent subject is disturbing!

SO......

WHat category does Chownah fall under?

Yeh it's hard to catagorize Chownah in just a few words, but I'll give it a go...

baffling, beyond comprehension, cryptic, enigmatic, fathomless, impenetrable, incognizable, inconceivable, inscrutable, mysterious, mystifying, obscure, opaque, perplexing, puzzling, unclear, unfathomable, ungraspable, unimaginable, unintelligible, unknowable, abstract, complex, complicated, deep, enigmatic, esoteric, heavy, hidden, incomprehensible, intricate, involved, obscure, perplexing, profound, puzzling, recondite, subtle, unfathomable, vague, abstruse, bewildering, beyond one, confusing, difficult to understand, enigmatic, hard to understand, incomprehensible, mystifying, over one's head, perplexing, unclear, unfathomable, abstruse, ambiguous, apocryphal, arcane, cabalistic, cryptic, dark, enigmatic, equivocal, esoteric, evasive, hidden, incomprehensible, inexplicable, murky, mysterious, mystic, mystical, mystifying, occult, opaque, oracular, perplexing, puzzling, recondite, secretive, strange, tenebrous, unclear, unfathomable, uninformative, vague, veiled, ambiguous, baffling, cagey, deceitful, deceptive, elusory, equivocal, evanescent, fallacious, fleeting, fraudulent, fugacious, fugitive, greasy, illusory, imponderable, incomprehensible, indefinable, insubstantial, intangible, jivey, misleading, occult, phantom, puzzling, shifty, shy, slippery, stonewalling, subtle, transient, transitory, tricky, unspecific, volatile, ambiguous, cryptic, dark, Delphian, doubtful, enigmatical, equivocal, incomprehensible, indecipherable, inexplicable, inscrutable, obscure, occult, oracular, perplexing, puzzling, recondite, secret, sphinxlike, stickling, stumping, teasing, uncertain, unfathomable, unintelligible, blurred, faltering, halting, hesitant, hesitating, inaudible, incoherent, incomprehensible, indistinct, maundering, muffled, mumbled, mumbling, mute, obscure, reticent, silent, speechless, stammering, tongue-tied, unclear, unintelligible, unspoken, unuttered, unvocal, unvoiced, vague, voiceless, wordless, breathless, confused, disconnected, discontinuous, discordant, disjointed, disordered, dumb, faltering, inarticulate, incohesive, incomprehensible, incongruous, inconsistent, indistinct, indistinguishable, irrational, jumbled, loose, maundering, muddled, muffled, mumbling, mute, muttered, puzzling, rambling, stammering, stuttering, tongue-tied, uncommunicative, unconnected, uncoordinated, uneven, unvocal, wandering, wild, extraordinary, fantasmo, fantastic, fishy, flimsy, implausible, impossible, improbable, incogitable, incomprehensible, incredible.

Do you know what I mean?

What a list! Rob is waxing lyrical...

What a list! Rob is waxing lyrical...

and that would hurt much less than a lyrical waxing

CB

Depends on where's being waxed!

What do they call it for guys? A back, crack and sack wax!

What do they call it for guys? A back, crack and sack wax!

I have heard of this and the pain must be ???????!

I am a hairless Celt (please read carefully) so I certainly wouldn't need this procedure!

Come on tiger you're fooling with us.Misleading us ladies into thinking you're a he-tiger when in fact.......

i would say all of the above

but that choice isn't available

Do trolls go to cyberhell? I wonder where Weho is...

Come on tiger you're fooling with us.Misleading us ladies into thinking you're a he-tiger when in fact.......

I am indeed a he-tiger, just of the Irish variety...

Do trolls go to cyberhell? I wonder where Weho is...

Well, if that's what you call that 'other' forum... but most of the banned TV posters use their old TV niks when they join there, and Weho isn't one of them. Could he have reinvented himself here? Of course not - that would be against the rules...

Yeh it's hard to catagorize Chownah in just a few words, but I'll give it a go...

baffling, beyond comprehension, cryptic, enigmatic, fathomless, impenetrable, incognizable, inconceivable, inscrutable, mysterious, mystifying, obscure, opaque, perplexing, puzzling, unclear, unfathomable, ungraspable, unimaginable, unintelligible, unknowable, abstract, complex, complicated, deep, enigmatic, esoteric, heavy, hidden, incomprehensible, intricate, involved, obscure, perplexing, profound, puzzling, recondite, subtle, unfathomable, vague, abstruse, bewildering, beyond one, confusing, difficult to understand, enigmatic, hard to understand, incomprehensible, mystifying, over one's head, perplexing, unclear, unfathomable, abstruse, ambiguous, apocryphal, arcane, cabalistic, cryptic, dark, enigmatic, equivocal, esoteric, evasive, hidden, incomprehensible, inexplicable, murky, mysterious, mystic, mystical, mystifying, occult, opaque, oracular, perplexing, puzzling, recondite, secretive, strange, tenebrous, unclear, unfathomable, uninformative, vague, veiled, ambiguous, baffling, cagey, deceitful, deceptive, elusory, equivocal, evanescent, fallacious, fleeting, fraudulent, fugacious, fugitive, greasy, illusory, imponderable, incomprehensible, indefinable, insubstantial, intangible, jivey, misleading, occult, phantom, puzzling, shifty, shy, slippery, stonewalling, subtle, transient, transitory, tricky, unspecific, volatile, ambiguous, cryptic, dark, Delphian, doubtful, enigmatical, equivocal, incomprehensible, indecipherable, inexplicable, inscrutable, obscure, occult, oracular, perplexing, puzzling, recondite, secret, sphinxlike, stickling, stumping, teasing, uncertain, unfathomable, unintelligible, blurred, faltering, halting, hesitant, hesitating, inaudible, incoherent, incomprehensible, indistinct, maundering, muffled, mumbled, mumbling, mute, obscure, reticent, silent, speechless, stammering, tongue-tied, unclear, unintelligible, unspoken, unuttered, unvocal, unvoiced, vague, voiceless, wordless, breathless, confused, disconnected, discontinuous, discordant, disjointed, disordered, dumb, faltering, inarticulate, incohesive, incomprehensible, incongruous, inconsistent, indistinct, indistinguishable, irrational, jumbled, loose, maundering, muddled, muffled, mumbling, mute, muttered, puzzling, rambling, stammering, stuttering, tongue-tied, uncommunicative, unconnected, uncoordinated, uneven, unvocal, wandering, wild, extraordinary, fantasmo, fantastic, fishy, flimsy, implausible, impossible, improbable, incogitable, incomprehensible, incredible.

Do you know what I mean?

is mumbled an adjective?

Do trolls go to cyberhell? I wonder where Weho is...

Well, if that's what you call that 'other' forum... but most of the banned TV posters use their old TV niks when they join there, and Weho isn't one of them. Could he have reinvented himself here? Of course not - that would be against the rules...

But not all of us that go over there from here are banned, Ping, are we? I'm certainly not. Not even a warning to my name. If Weho was here first, then he's not there, IMO. But he may have been there first, under another name, I guess . And, no, I'm not hinting at anything, that is purely supposition. I have no idea who Weho was, but I do think he was very funny.

Agreed NR. I was not implying that the only posters over there from here have been banned here, merely that it is often a first port of call for those who do get banned from here. Hope that makes sense. (I had to read it twice myself!)

Indeed, there are quite a few current members of both forums - some posting more than others over there. Pity about the politics of it all (well, certainly from the other place's perspective) but so be it - I really don't want to get into that side of things here, and I don't think it would be appreciated if I did.

Guys let's limit the conversation to trolls and avoid a discussion on who posts where and why.

Thanks

CB

In an attempt to get the conversation back on topic - do you think trolls target particular people on a forum. I can think of several cases where a poster has written something in full knowledge that at least one other member will not be able to resist "rising to the bait". In two of those cases the "target" bit and his reply resulted in a formal warning and suspension.

CB

In two of those cases the "target" bit and his reply resulted in a formal warning and suspension.

CB

For the troll or the target?

It's a typical troll tactic, most trolls are not strangers to the forum that they attack, many join and just lurk, or lurk without joining. It always makes me a little suspicious if a poster has been a member for a very long time without making a single post and even more suspicious when somebody joins and immediately makes a post that could be questionable.

But there are also the accidental trolls, another forum thought that I was a troll once, I wasn't I was just new and asking what the veterans considered to be questionable, but were in fact just dumb questions.