TROLL ALERT!

[Hein van Meeteren]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007 07:38:35 +0200, Erik van den Muijzenberg <muijz at DDS.NL> 
wrote:

Weer een heel verhaal vol zieligheid, beledigingen en ik - heb - gelijkjes. 
Maar daarover geen woord. Wel: ik lees het nu pas doordat ik even langswip 
op de nic.surfnet homepage (archief). 

Erik is een manifeste TROLL, en dit is het verhaal en de remedie:

Netiquette Guidelines"

What is an Internet Troll/ Forum troll? 
An "Internet troll" or "Forum Troll" or "Message Board Troll" is a person 
who posts outrageous message to bait people to answer. Forum Troll delights 
in sowing discord on the forums.  A troll is someone who inspires flaming 
rhetoric, someone who is purposely provoking and pulling people into 
flaming discussion.  Flaming discussions usually end with name calling and 
a flame war.
 
A classic CureZone troll is trying to make us believe that he is a genuine 
skeptic with no hidden agenda.  He is divisive and argumentative with need-
to-be-right attitude, "searching for the truth",  flaming discussion, and 
sometimes insulting people or provoking people to insult him.  Troll is 
usually an expert in reusing the same words of its opponents and in turning 
it against them.
While sometimes, he may sound like a stupid, uninformed, ignorant poster, 
do not be deceived!  Most trolls are highly intelligent people trying to 
hide behind a mask of stupidity and/or  ignorance!  They usually have an 
agenda. Very few trolls come to CureZone out of pure skepticism.

A CureZone Troll is generally a person who is extremely skeptical of the 
main forum subject.
He is generally interested to make other forum members look stupid. A troll 
will sometimes use insults to provoke other people to insult him. Then, he 
will complain to moderators of being insulted and will request that his 
opponents get banned from further discussion.Sometimes, Internet troll is 
trying to spin conflicting information, is questioning in an insincere 
manner, flaming discussion, insulting people, turning people against each 
other, harassing forum members,  ignoring warnings from forum moderators.

When trolls are ignored they step up their attacks, desperately seeking the 
attention they crave. Their messages become more and more foul, and they 
post ever more of them.

Alternatively, they may protest that their right to free speech is being 
curtailed.  

Next time you are on a message board and you see a post by somebody whom 
you think is a troll, and you feel you must reply, simply write a follow-up 
message entitled "Troll Alert" and type only this:

The only way to deal with trolls is to limit your reaction and not to 
respond to trolling messages.  It is well known that most people don't read 
messages that nobody responds to, while 99% of forum visitors first read 
the longest and the largest threads with the most answers.
  

Troll Message is an outrageous message posted to a message board, newsgroup 
or mailing list to bait people to answer.
  

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