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Definition of a troll
"Trolls" are people (or posts) that make use of a discussion forum the
same way public bathroom walls are used by some for graffiti. These posts
are sometimes malicious and inflammatory, racist, sexist, insulting -
anything that can disrupt a discussion thread and turn attention to the
troll.
If you are new to these forums, and you should happen on a post that
fits this description (believe me, they'll usually be quite obvious),
the safest thing for you to do is to wait and see how more experienced
posters respond. Chances are good that someone will leave a little "no
content" message saying "troll", or something like that. And that will
be the sum total of the response.
The reason we don't let ourselves get baited into responding is because
that's exactly what the troll wants. The entire purpose of these posts
is to cause a maximum amount of mischief, and turn people away from the
flow of normal dialog (and sometimes turn one person against another).
If you don't feel compelled to respond to the scribblings you see in
public bathrooms, then you should feel equally at ease about ignoring
this type of post, too. Just ignore it, and go about your business
having fun talking to everybody. :-)
An interesting site which describes several different kinds of trolls
can be found here: Small Lexicon Of Usenet Trolls.
What I have with trolls
I've been a regular contributor to some newsgroups and online forums for a
couple of years. On each and every one of those I've seen the damage that
can be done when people rise to the bait of a troll. Some newsgroups and
forums have a rather loose policy (or non at all) of how to deal with trolls,
which is often the case if there hasn't been a troll visiting for a long
time.
In that case, there are often many newbies or other posters who haven't
learned to recognise a troll, who will go for the troll's bait, and take
him (or her) seriously. That sparks a snowball effect, with the troll
responding ever more agressively to each and every one of the responders,
trying to lure them into responding even more. Since angry posters will
often lose all reason, they can pull the entire newsgroup down with them,
since because of their continued responses to the troll, the newsgroup will
quickly be filled with nothing but threads and posts about the troll. In
the meanwhile the troll will bask in all of the attention (s)he gets, loving
the destruction done and feeling superior to all those dumbo's responding to
their bait.
It's incredible to see how much damage can be done by a troll to communities
that were happy and undisturbed for years. The rec.boats.paddle and
rec.boats.paddle.touring newsgroups were left limping after a character called
"Tim Ingram" aka the "sponson man" started attacking each and every post that
he could attach his poisonous messages to. He kept attacking for about six months,
and as a result, most of the regulars left that newsgroup, going to forums that
were controlled by admins instead, like Eric Princen's Boatertalk.com. The exodus
left rec.boats.paddle as only a shadow of its former self.
Previous attacks by Timmy didn't leave as much damage, since he wasn't taken
seriously by the regulars at the time. During his latest attack on
rec.boats.paddle, he found a lot of newbies and troll-unaware posters that
kept on going for his bait, creating wave after wave of sponson-related
threads and thread-invasions.
Other trolls on the rec.boats.paddle newsgroup include Scott "Last word" Weiser,
who tends to start up threads about paddlers not being allowed to move on rivers
in his U.S. state of Colorado. He's almost universally recognised as a troll by
most of the regular posters, so he's getting ever less responses with his baiting
posts.
He has gotten quite a bit more aggressive in his responses, personally attacking
people and even threathening. At first he was a lot more dangerous, as his then well
argumented posts would lure in many an unsuspecting poster to reply to what seemed
a reasonable invitation to discussion, and he caught many of the regulars that way.
That has changed since then though. The wording he choses is of lesser quality, he
is more eager to insult and he threathens quicker, stooping lower and lower with
each consecutive post. That in itself should be a warning to those who can't resist
the urge to reply to a troll: if you feed the sick puppy more, getting more rubbish
to come out of him.
His urge to always get the last word in any discussion or flame war got him the
nickname "Last word" by regular Riviera Ratt.
Another example is the current situation on the uk.rec.boats.paddle newsgroup.
Two trolls, by the names of "Allan Bennett" and "David Kemper", who are working
together, have managed to invade many threads with their anti-BCU
(British Canoeing Union) bait. By the time I write this (January 2002), they have
managed to scare away most of the regulars.
Their attack was rather classical for that of the aggressive kind of troll: by
first flooding the newsgroup with anti-BCU messages in such an agressive way that
made any kind of discussion impossible. Then they started with personal attacks on
everyone who either supported the BCU or who took them seriously in other ways.
Finally they invaded threads of messages that had no relevance to the BCU, and
they further disrupted the newsgroup by trying to dictate rules about what was
and wasn't on-topic for the uk.rec.boats.paddle newsgroup. Intimidation and
cross-posting to several other newsgroups are other tactics used by these two
trolls to try to spread their poison.
As can be seen in all of the above examples, the trolls tend to post a lot of
(often extremely long) messages, in which the original words that they seem to
reply to are misinterpreted, pulled out of context or simply ignored. Since they
only use a serious subject to hide their true intent, trolling, they tend to be
impervious to reason. Naively replying to their posts and taking them seriously
only gives them new fuel to add to their fire, and sooner or later you find
yourself under a barrage of personal attacks and flames.
Another thing that can kill a forum is flaming. A discussion goes out of hand,
sometimes because a troll cross posts a message to two different newsgroups,
like a message on how to cook a cat on a newsgroup for cat haters and another
one for cat-owners. As a result, people attack each other, becoming ever more
aggressive, and finally flooding one or more forums with so many posts that it
becomes vitually impossible to find the few serious and on topic posts between
the flood of flame-posts.
An interesting site which describes many character types of flamers can be found
here: Flamers
Spam and the effect on newsgroups
Commercial posts (aka "Spam") appear on just about every newsgroup, but they generally
don't cause too much of a problem, as long as the frequency of those kinds of posts
doesn't reach a certain limit. From then on, spam can have the same effect as the
flaming and trolling, flooding a newsgroup with so many off-topic posts that it
becomes too much trouble to try to find the few on topic posts between all the
commercial garbage. What seems to work to keep the volume of spam down a bit is to
immediately report all spam to free anti-spam service such as
Spamcop .
There are a couple of steps to get rid of most of the the above pests, but you will
generally need to convince the majority of the posters to also take the right action.
That can be frustrating at times, since there will always be a couple of them who
don't see the danger to their newsgroup or who think that "winning with arguments"
over a troll or flamer will be more effective than ignoring them. Especially in the
case of a troll, they're plain wrong.
The moment you reply to a troll, whether it is with some insult, by reasoning or
even by screaming at them, you give them attention, and that means the troll wins.
The more attention you give to a troll, the more (s)he will try to get even more of it.
Negative attention serves just the same purpose there, as these people don't respond
the same as your average poster, but that's in part why they started trolling in the
first place, right?
In the case of flamers and trolls, I suggest first posting a message with a short
description of a troll or flamer. That might help to get this phenomena clear to the
newbies and troll/flamer-unaware posters in your newsgroup. If that doesn't help, get
together in private e-mail with as many of the regulars as you can, asking them how
they dealt with trolls in the past, and maybe setting up an intervention group. The
people from that group can write e-mail replies to those newsbies and troll-unaware
posters that still rise to the bait, explaining to them what the effect is of their
naive responses and replies to trolls and flamers.
Whatever you do, don't respond directly to the troll or flamer, as you will only add
fuel to their fire. Also, please don't add messages to their threads or posts, for
a number of reasons:
-Without those messages, the thread will not grow longer. Quickly growing threads
tend to atract more attention from people who wonder what is going on, pulling in
more potential victims for the troll.
-The thread will not be kept on the newsserver longer, because no-one kept it
alive. That makes it appear on servers for less time, keeping the amount of people
who get exposed to it down and it also helps limit bandwidth.
-The thread will not alert other trolls to the fertile trolling ground that a
newsgroup or forum can sometimes be.
-Your message won't attract more replies from newbies who think that it's normal
to reply to trolling (and spam) messages.
-Replying to a message probably gives the troll new arguments to use against you
or the group. That will show him new buttons to push and opens you and the newsgroup
up for prolonged attacks.
-Anyone with a decent spam-filter or kill-file who filters out the normal spam and
trolls will still get the replies to that original message, so the troll's words
might get to live on anyway, and you have frustrated your fellow newsgroup users.
-By replying with only one or two lines in which you post your frustration (yes,
sometimes my fingers itched too, but use some self-discipline!) it often happens that
the complete original troll's or spammer's message is included. That only serves to
get the spammer or troll's message sent to all those newsservers around the world again.
Please be at least smart enough to clip all of the troll's text if you can't refrain
from replying!
-Any decent troll will feed off the attention he generates with his messages. If you
deprive him of that negative attention, after a while he will wither away.
I could probably come up with more reasons not to reply, but I hope that I bring the
message across: Don't reply!
For those who don't have the self control to stop reponding to a troll, a lovely
invention called "message filters" or "kill files" is in existence in most of the popular
newsreaders (FreeAgent, Netscape and Outlook for example). You can just put people,
e-mail addresses and subject lines in them, so that they don't appear on your screen any
more. It can be a bit of work, but it can definately make your life easier. The problem
with killfiles is that most newbies don't have a clue how to use them, which means that
you might still see their follow-up messages to the troll's post.
In some newsgroups there is a charter that forbids trolling, spamming and such, and besides
that there is the universal netiquette that is (supposed to) count for every newsgroup. In
that case, writing directly to the abuse account of the troll or spammer's ISP (Internet
Service Provider) might work, especially if you can quote the paragraph that forbids the
behaviour which that ISP's client shows. The downside to this is that some trolls use free
ISP's or have several accounts, which might mean that they simply move to another account
or free ISP.
In the case of a full-blown flame war, involving the majority of posters, it can be useful
to just stay away from a newsgroup for a while, to let the embers cool down, before you
check back. Hopefully by then the regulars have learned from the experience... However,
when you do leave a group for a while, don't post any of the dramatic "I'm leaving"
messages, as it will only make the troll think that he's winning.
Alas, some
newsgroups die because there is nothing worthwhile to read or respond to any more. It
helps to have a couple of regulars around that write inviting on topic posts after a
flame war or troll invades the newsgroup, if just to keep the newsgroup interesting for
the posters not involved in the troll or flame war.
An informative "HowTo" which is aimed at becoming a more creative troll can be found
here. Just as the "Hacker's Guide"
can be a great tool in understanding the hacker who attackes your computer, this "HowTo"
gives some good insight into the troll's background and modus operandi. Another good
description of some sorts of trolls can be found at Dave's usenet abuse FAQs . Go to "6. Why do they do it?" for a couple of troll descriptions. Dave also describes
some good anti-troll measures on his site, along with their pro's and cons.
A web search on "troll" and "usenet" usually brings up a long list of sites with plenty
of information, here are some links that I found offered some extra info:
"Info about other nasty critters on forums, such as bullies."
"Some real life examples of trolls on different forums."
"
Some more real life examples of trolls on different forums."
Spam can be dealt with in part by reporting each and every incursion to
Spamcop or a similar anti-spam service. Here too, it
helps if there are many people sending in spam-reports, as volume often does make a
difference in how the net admins deal with complaints.
Another really useful service is offered for free by
Know-Spam.com and Spamhaus.org
Know Spam is really easy to use, and basically downloads your mail for you, removing
most of the spam. By giving you an update message every day, you can chose to download
anything that you still want to see. The good thing is that you can allow the spam
filter to let messages from certain domains or individual addresses by simply clicking
on the respective e-mail address in the update messages. I've used it for a while now,
and the spam in my inbox has gone down to almost nothing.
On my website I have stopped using the "mailto:" option to offer a clickable e-mail
address, and instead I put a little image on it which shows my e-mail address. Perfectly
safe from spambots harvesting addresses.
No matter what you try against spammers, never ever click on the "click here to remove"
links that are being offered in some spam. That link only warns the spammer that your
address is active, and that you're stupid enough to actually read their garbage. To put
it differently, you're not only telling a criminal that you're the perfect target for a
burglar, but you just gave them your house number as well!
The new European Union law about unsollicited e-mail should help lessen the Spam
threat from within EU countries somewhat. Of course, untill the rest of the world
follows that example, we'll probably be seeing a lot of Spam coming from other locations
for some time to come.
I hope that this helps you to keep enjoying your forum. Don't let a few anti-social
characters destroy a place that they don't have any real interest in anyway. Ignore them
and keep going on about your business like you did before. I guess that most of us have
responded to trolls and flamers at one point or another. I know that I have... :-)
I have learned from it, and I have acted ever since when I saw that a forum that I cared
about came under fire from trolls, spammers or flamers. Often it helped, sometimes it's a
lost battle. Some forums are made up of regulars who had to move from their previously lost
newsgroup, to one where there is a zero tolerance policy, or even one which is controlled
by a moderator. They have their own advantages and disadvantages, you decide for yourself
if that's what you're looking for.
I hope that this helped.
If there are any questions about anything I wrote above, please let me know. My e-mail
address can be found on the first page of my website.
Wilko
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