Er, ah, um...

Sorry, Girl, have to disagree.

I am personally very uncomfortable with publicly labelling someone a troll except for truly egregious troll behavior--which so far I don't really see demonstrated. True, he doesn't seem to bring much feedback to his threads, and the "But what about this picture?" threads are annoying, but then, a certain percentage of people on message boards are like that. They're there to make their voices heard, not to "make conversation" in the sense of talking "with" other people. And a certain percentage of people on other message boards do tend to post pointless "Hey, what about this?" threads, whether it's gardening or Harry Potter or Britney Spears or whatever.

Some people are just conversationally challenged, they don't "get" the idea of "feedback" with other people--it doesn't necessarily mean they're trolling.

I think Skywatcher is just someone who's found a comfortable Internet venue for his voice to be heard, not that he's particularly interested in astronomy as such, but just that this is a safe place to make posts without fear of devastating flames and mockery, such as is found on some other boards like the SDMB and JREF.

And I think for this reason he's probably also a heavy contributor to Godlike, under *whatever* name, because all the posts there are pretty much totally self-involved, basically like painting your name on the subway wall. No feedback from other people is required.

And hey, there's room for that kind of thing on the Internet. Different strokes, etc. Check out any Tweens message board--all those 12-year-olds aren't talking to each other at all, they're just talking to the air, to themselves.

Let him alone, I say. [shrug] Time will tell. One of three things will happen:

1. He'll get worse, more "in your face", and his true nature will be revealed.

2. He'll get better--he'll get enough constructive feedback from the BABB community to figure out the "conversation" thing, and he'll turn into a productive member of the community.

3. He'll stay the same, and will continue posting threads without really responding to posts in them. Which I don't think really hurts anything.

The way I see it, it's a win-win-win situation for the BABB.