Trolling and trolls

[Captain Obvious]

A term that's oft used, present and undefined.

What is "trolling" and how should TPF deal with it?

[Conley]

[Shoot the Goose]

If we gave warnings to everyone who trolls, the server would be overloaded with them.

But - feel free to make a suggestion in the "forum improvements" thread.

Look. A trolling post is not a big deal. But only trolling posts, where someone has established a pattern of being only a troll .... that is a tumor to be excised. The biggest cancers on any site are the trolls, who hide behind spineless rules. Joaguin should be banned. Cigar banned. Compel folks to be able to bring information with them if they want to post.

We are big boys and girls. We can handle the insults from members who have earned their keep. What we will recoil at with venom are those who have done nothing to build or enhance this platform, but only leech off it.

[KC]

[roadmaster]

Well when one dislikes the others comments they are always accused of trolling. I could have said you were trolling when you kept calling a tee-shirt a flag but it would not have been true. Define trolling.

[KC]

Any sort of content that is posted with the single aim of getting an inflammatory reaction from other members of the forums, is trolling, I think.

[Shoot the Goose]

Man, that was slick. Couldn't edit my post in the other thread, but came here, and voila !

What is trolling ? Its sniping, with no contribution to the thread. Occasional sniping by established members is no big deal. But when such as Joaguin, or Cigar, establish patterns of only sniping, aka "trolling", a couple Mods ought to be able to look at it and issue a stern warning, along the lines of "contibute some informed opinions, or you are outta here". You can be subjective. Its not a court of law. Just do it with the obvious trolls. Who cares if they whine ? If they argue, then ban them.

Another way to look at is would be reps and thanks. In business, it is known as "always being able to fire the bottom 10%". Lop off the bottom 10% on occasion, in terms of minimal performance with appreciation by other members. Its like flushing the toilet !

[Captain Obvious]

Any sort of content that is posted with the single aim of getting an inflammatory reaction from other members of the forums, is trolling, I think.

That defines a lot of what is posted here.

[KC]

That defines a lot of what is posted here.

I would argue that a good amount of what is posted here is trolling. I don't care, because show me a forum where that doesn't happen, but yes this forum is extremely troll heavy.

[URF8]

It's difficult to define "justice," "beauty," "integrity," and "trolling."

People simply can't agree on the meaning of these terms. I think you have to look at the motive of the alleged troll. But that in itself is also difficult.

One also has to look at the external context of the alleged trolling. This is election season after all. That means emotions are running high.

Some alleged trolls are filled with emotions which are difficult to explain. Here's what one alleged troll once wrote on another forum:

I've spent the last half hour typing a response to your question only to repeatedly
delete what I've written while I gather my thoughts. I am pseudo-historian
compared to the men and women against which I measure myself.

I grew up and became a man in an era of American history much like Rome during the reigns of the Five Good Emperors who governed the Empire consecutively for a period of
about 90 years in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. This was the
heighth of Empire. It was quite literally the best of times for a the first
iteration of Western Civilization. For some it was a Golden Age. Imo that span
of time was like the American Era of world history from 1941 to 2001. Others
would say the era lasted from 1945 to 1973.

I was an American patriot who loved a land so dearly that my feelings crossed into nationalism and even chauvinism. I say this to give you perspective on the transformation of my world view.

In 2004 I began to understand that I had been willfully blind in
many ways for almost twenty years. But then, I was in good company.

I knew denial and anger and the other stages of grief for a beloved land. Then for
my own well being I began to detach myself emotionally from the fate of that
land. Rome devolved, split up, and became something else while still calling
itself Roman.

America was a polity the creation of which was based on an
idea. What becomes of that polity when the idea dies?

I think I now understand how the Russian nobility must have felt around the time of the
Russo-Japanese War when the Russian defeat revealed a hollow empire. Similarly,
I think I know how some members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union must
have felt in the mid-1980s when they realized that they had spent seventy years
on the road to no where. Neither the Russian nobility nor the Soviet
intelligentsia could save what they loved.

The land that I loved is gone. And I am aware that the past can never truly be restored.

I am still in love, but now I am in love with the idea on which the polity was originally
based. Individual liberty. This idea was born in Classical Greece, survived for
almost 450 years in the form of the Roman Republic, and appeared again in the
Venetian Republic of the Renaissance.

That idea was refined and distilled during the European Enlightenment by men like Locke, Montesquieu, and Rosseau. The idea became incarnate again with the birth of America and its
Constitution. It spread across a continent, expanded to other races and women,
and spread through the world.

The idea is now being rolled back slowly
with the end of the American Era of the Western Epoch of history. But the idea
won't ever die. It will appear again in some unknown polity among an unknown
people.

Am I too pessimistic? Perhaps, but detachment breeds objectivity.
Some will say that nothing remains the same. This is true. There is a tide in
the affairs of men and women to paraphrase the Bard. And I have seen this all
before in a book by Edward Gibbon.