This has been a public service announcement.......

Well, like self-described destructive hackers and anarchists...they are just shit-disturbers.

Unfortunately, with the internet, you really can have a hard time finding out who is who.

As-salaamu alaikum

-Omni

nom nom nom.

Christ's peace - r

....and of course if any actual trolls would like to give a talk about the Art of Trolling, they would, I'm sure, be received with some interest  (and there would be refreshments afterward).

Stop scaring me!

As I age I find myself starting most sentences with "in my day"..........

In my day there was radio and television. You simply turned the media on and you were entertained - no hackers, spammers, or cyberspace trollers to contend with.

The other day I went to book a rail ticket online. As advised by my bank, I dutifully checked to see if that cute little locked padlock was in evidence. I'd just given my credit card details, when a plane flew over or something and I lost my wireless internet connection. This left me with a tormented sleepless night - was the entire world shopping till they dropped on my credit card?

PP sighs. "In my day"......................

Pilgrims, I find even myself saying "in my day..."  things are progressing so fast!

As-salaamu alaikum

-Omni

Omni,

I admire the clever way you used my "name" in your comment.

Must be the bow tie! 

;)

I love that thing xD

As-salaamu alaikum

-Omni

 Back in my day, TROLLING was tying a dragonfly pupae to the end of your sinking line and paddling slowly along just off the drop off, in hopes of catching a lunker.

Oh wow, I did not know about that 

"Trolling" is now officially a new word in my dictionary. Well... not that I am going to use it on a daily basis, but still. 

Oh and the Art of Trolling. I like that, it's catchy. I'm sure this Art is extremely complicated in nature. We will, for sure, need some experts to show us how to pick out the trolls from the ogres.  Cause you know, they possess the same characteristics.

I wonder if there are any trolls on WonderCafe?

Teenaged trolls are charictarized by extremely bad spelling and grammar.  They are in it for the "lulz".  If you want a real culture shock, go visit 4chan.  I won't link it.  Just Google it, but don't say I didn't warn you.

An online gaming group I'm involved in was "hacked" by a group of kids who got an admin password.  They wiped our hosting account, replaced it with an "pwned by" image, jumped on our voice server (kinda like a conference call) and told the group members present about what they did, just to hear our guys yelling at them.  They like that sort of thing.

The solution was not to give them what they want.  I got on the voice server and instructed everyone to log off.  We shut down the voice server.  Then, we took our website offline, and one call to our host had us back up and running with the backup of our site.  Once they realized we were not going to be a source of amusement, they left.  We tried to track them, and even got someone "into" their group, but they did something really stupid, and their website was taken down and I haven't seen them in a year or more.

They feed on negative energy.  They want you to hate them.

As a 30-something online gamer (something I actually haven't done in 9 months now), trying to get young gamers to bahave decently online was one of my goals.  I've talked to dozens of them.  It's just pack mentality.  In a group, and with the anonymity of the Internet, kids will do really, really mean and terrible things.  I've likened it to a youth sports team with no adult coach, and no adults around at all - anarchy reigns.

Lord of the flies.

Know all about them. I'm an admin on my clan server. They get three chances then a kick. If they repeat, they are banned from our server. And swearing at an admin gets an immediate ban. I can't say more about how we enforce the ban, but we have no repeat offenders. At the same time, there are some decent gamers out there who we do encourage; just play by our rules.

OK, I was hesitant to say "clan", but yes, I was the server admin at mine for years, with a monthly budget approaching $1000.  I'm very familiar with the sort of assclown you're talking about, but the example above went way beyond that.  Our game server auto-kicks for language.  Not because we're prudes, but because most who take the time to type swear words aren't the sort of people you want around.  The voice server is much more relaxed.

I get your point, though I never connected the two, probably because I never read Tolkien.  By now, I just know of him and his books.  While everyone else in my class was reading Tolkien, I was reading Douglas Adams.

Hi chansen,

Uhhhh.  Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings.

Lord of the Flies was written by William Golding.  The most recent screen adaptation was made in 1990.  It was a decent adaptation.

Grace and peace to you.

John

I thought Trolls were little plastic dolls with funky hair?? My bad!!

What I read was fascinating. 

Three of four of them will participate in a thread to keep it moving or direct it.  They will post an improbable thread topic and see how many are taken in.  They invent problems and watch everyone swarm to give advice while laughing up their sleeves.  They deliberately give bad advice to vulnerable people too.  

When they get good at it, one couldn't be blamed for being clueless.  Part of the troll's challenge is to "blend in".

OH! the power!!!!  .....and loads of fun.....

Who'dda thought......

WARNING:  Do not  click any of the external links from this Wiki page.  They are booby trapped with viruses!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

Well this has all been very interesting and educational.

Jon 71: Yeah, Lord of the Flies. I myself prefer the original black and white film. Excellent, profound stuff.

I think once we find these trolls out, we should ignore the little buggers. "Don't feed the trolls!"

lol

Clearly, I never read Golding, either.  At least I got the "Lord of the" part right.  Scoring 3 out of 4 on a book I've never read is pretty good.

In this sense of the word, you don't have trolls.  I've seen no evidence that WC has teens pretending to be fundamentalists on any side.  The kids who do this are not that good at it.  It's terribly easy to spot them:  Their posts are short, their spelling is decidedly "modern" (u now it when u see it), their grammar is worse, and they lose interest quickly and move on to their next target.

Besides, they want to goof with really hot-button stuff like holocaust denial and 9/11 crackpots to get their lulz.  The UCC just wouldn't be an interesting target for them.  All that would happen is RevJohn would try to talk sense to them, and DonnyGuitar's explaination of why he is offended would bore them, and everyone else, to tears.

I agree that we probably don't have an infestation like that.  It is pretty boring here in that sense.  Might be mildly amusing to stir things up a bit, but not exciting. 

We probably don't need to spray ourselves down with "Troll Off"

Besides, I find the majority of the  ÿouts" on this site considerably more mature than some of their adult counterparts, and interesting enough in their own right without the necessity of being a troll.

Personally I preferred Tolkein's version.

Although Tolstoy did a fair adaptation as well.

It's the modern day equivalent of throwing eggs at cars.

Believe it or not I've never seen any movie version of it. The book was required reading for 9th grade political science.

The book was fabulous and movies not bad..  But the descent of the boys into a scary tribe was something

Did you notice the name? 

 Dreil N

aka "derailing"????

Nice catch.  Still more likely to be a simple bot spamming for a payday loan place than anything else.

The avatar reminds me of "Max Headroom" (remember him?)

Good catch. I thought it looked odd.

OK, That's good.

Yeah, I remember Max Hedroom. He was funny.