I think it's pretty easy for the average denizen of the net to recognize a troll when one appears. Despite the good intentions of those who espouse the excellent idea of "Please don't feed the trolls," the trolls seem to get fed anyway.

Case in point--the recent trolling by oxxo here:

http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=15572

oxxo said in his second post (paraphrasing) "I don't want to discuss this with people who think we really did land on the moon; I just want to discuss with other HBs how the hoax was actually perpetrated." Despite this, people flood the thread with refutations of the reasons why he believes the hoax was faked. Granted there were several posters who replied, advising that oxxo read the FAQ for the BABB ground rules--these don't count.

oxxo said from the beginning that he/she did not want to discuss the veracity of the Moon Hoax. Yet the thread was swamped with posts concerning just that.

So why do we feed the trolls? Is it because when we see something we feel is beyond preposterous, we're just galvanized into action, despite our better judgment? Or do we take a perverse kind of glee from attacking the arguments of someone who think is wrong, even though we intuitively know that we will never change their minds?

I don't respond to the trolls myself, but I admit that reading some of the "troll" threads is very entertaining. Once I get the tone of the troll's rants, I usually just skim them, but then I start reading some of the regulars tear apart the troll's arguments to pieces. We've got to believe that smashing a troll's arguments is a hopeless exercise, and yet we do it anyway...

(edit to fix grammar mistake)

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I am the terror that flaps in the night...
Arcadia Prime - Battle Reports and more from the 41st millenium
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It also depends on the nature of the troll. Sometimes they don't seem like trolls until you get into the thread. Othertimes, like Hellraiser, it's pretty obvious.

JayUtah has covered in the past that he will still respond even when dealing with an obvious troll, because he hopes that others who are more open minded might learn something from his response.

I personally like the exercise in critical thinking so I'll tend to respond. Although, like several of the other apollo hoax people I had my fill of Oxxo already and just decided to toy with him.

I'm with Normandy on this one, and that's why I picked Sometimes, but it's only an accident.

I also think it's a pointless exercise to go into the thread in question to say, "Don't feed the trolls," which is why I started a completely different thread for that purpose. Now, we can resurrect it when necessary.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

I'm just evil by nature, so I have this really nasty tendency to mock the trolls. I bite down on my tongue really hard here, but sometimes cutting the darned thing off still doesn't stop my fingers from walking.

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"I'm making wheatloaf. It's like meatloaf, only with wheat"
"Isn't that just...bread?"

I don't feed them, but I read the topics.

If someone is obviosuly trolling, and you even have an inkling I would lock the thread, then don't post. PM me, and I'll take care of it. A troll just wastes time and space.

Good Advice BA.

Thanks

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

It's hard for me not to respond when someone says something I know is wrong, so sometimes I will even though I know it's a wasted effort.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yeah. me too.

When I get that feeling, I just Yell Expletives at The Screen, the Dirtier, the Better; the Need, Soon Passes ...

Try it, it works.

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

It's not necessarily a wasted effort. Just think of all the lurkers out there who might be reading the posts, both by the troll as well as by yourself. If not for your response, it's quite possible that *someone* out there might have continued to believe that what the troll said is in fact correct, especially since noone bothered to dispute it.

Before we decide whether we should feed a particular troll, we should make sure that the poster is indeed a troll. I've seen several threads that started off non-trollish that quickly went downhill. This is often enflamed by regular posters debating aginst arguments that don't exist. Assumptions make a you know what.

We need to be better at identifying troll posts. The post with a subject line that reads: "I think Aliens rule the white house and you are all tools of the evil government NASA conspiracy" is obviously a troll attempt. However, the "I have a legitimate question about a nutty wacko theory" may not be a troll. The latter case may be a troll, but perhaps the community is better served by simply assuming that particular poster is an idiot.

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J Pax

I can't do that; it frightens the cats (not to mention my wife).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

HB=authoritarian
It's that simple, and the demented "Oxxo" is a classically obvious example.

BABB trolls seek to affirm their personal authority and power. All responses should be geared toward undermining those objectives. Refusing to respond at all is appropriate in many cases, but the troll's personal authority should always be the target.

What about feeding the Drolls? Should we let them starve too? Or is it wishful thinking since they are often scavengers or carrion eaters...

BTW, A droll is one who's post have the following quality: "having a humorous, whimsical, or odd quality" (www.m-w.com)

I think we all know who these are... :-$

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

It's not nice to be calling ToSeek names, Jpax.

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"I'm making wheatloaf. It's like meatloaf, only with wheat"
"Isn't that just...bread?"

With some addtional programming a bulletin board could set up a troll trap. When an administrator decides that someone is a troll he marks the thread to be available only to the troll. To everyone else it appears to have been deleted. Then every time the troll posts the system generates a random insult and adds it to the thread 15 to 30 minutes later. Maybe some online artificial intelligence program could be accessed to make it more realistic. Since the troll would be getting the attention he wants he'd leave the rest of the board alone, specially since the screen names he's arguing with don't post anywhere else.

When the troll gets bored and goes away the thread would be deleted for real or perhaps made public for awhile for everyone's amusement.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. All of your choices are bad for you.

I'd modify that a bit, Chuck. First off, some trolls seem to like talking to themselves. If you look at the oxxo threads over on Apollohoax you'll see that before he got the boot he was making a string of [Bugs Bunny voice] "and foithermore" [/Bugs Bunny voice] posts. Earth Orbit did the same, and I've seen some black belt woowoos on the JREF board display the same behavior.

I'd just set the thread so that only the troll could post and leave it at that. Everybody else could use the PM feature to get up a betting pool on how long it would take before it decides that nobody's going to come out to play and takes its ball and goes home.

And leave out the random-insult generator. Besides being kinda childish, they're old hat- the computers in SSL 4000 and 6000 consoles have been saying nasty things to operators who enter 3 unintelligible commands in a row since the late '80s. :wink:

Hmm, perhaps that idea has merit. I remember some old MS-DOS programs that would act like a therapist, asking questions and incorporating some of the data input as answers. A "therapy" approach is probably better troll deterent than insults.

As a matter of fact, we could make a BB system or plugin using this idea and call it Troll-X™. Then we could all sit back and get rich...

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

What happens when the anti-troll program meets up with a troll program? Will the universe collapse in upon itself?

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"I'm making wheatloaf. It's like meatloaf, only with wheat"
"Isn't that just...bread?"

I seem to recall someone sticking the famous computer program that pretended to be a psychotherapist with another computer program that pretended to be a paranoid schizophrenic. The resulting conversation was virtually incomprehensible.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.