Years ago PBS operated a political discussion thread. One of the members was a highly educated liberal who went by the name Ciudana. We both had troubles with the same troll. I took the rash approach and reacted to his insults. She took the intelligent approach and monitored his method of posting. She discovered that his responses followed a set pattern. That his mere actions revealed when he was getting frustrated and when it was time to move in for "the kill" (make him say something that the mods when they returned on Monday would delete).
One Friday evening Ciudana and myself teamed up against him. Not planned just happened. As the arguments progressed she would tell him when he had reached one of his standard levels of behavior. By the time Monday morning rolled around the majority of his comments got deleted ours remained.
Ciudana eventually got banned but I remembered well the lessons she taught me regarding the individual and his mental state. At one time I posted a little toy that would ping his IP address back to him when he was reading a post that I had made (the toy was part of my signature). He was paranoid. I decorated it with the Linux Penguin he became convinced that Linux was a large group of hackers.
Then I employed a few socks. It got to the point where he thought everyone who commented on his posts was me. He even accused posters who had been on that sight for years of being me. He eventually started threatening to have me investigated.
That is when his ass got banned. His ass not mine. Mine did not get banned until after the 2008 election and I made a comment about the complexion of the president elect.
I have matured considerably since those days.
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