2009: The Year of Not Being Trolled

I propose thus for the coming year: don’t get trolled. We have a few unbelievably skilled trolls here in P&R, and while I’m not going to name names, I think we all know who they are. All the same, we almost always know we’re being trolled, and we often get hot-blooded and respond anyway. So I suggest that we make a pact now to refuse to respond to trolls for the next year. Just stop, outright, simple as that. For the betterment of all. For a brighter tomorrow. For a less irritating P&R.

Who’s with me?

Yeah, I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there.

Good troll ;).

Iran is the real-world location of Satan, Loki, and Skeletor. We must bomb them now, because they want to kill us, and we have the moral imperative due to our clean Christian blood.

H.

I suggest we start up a patrol to stop the trolling.

If you are caught on the go by the Troll Patrol you will have to pay a tall toll.

But if you tell the Troll Patrol that there is a troll traipsing through the topics you will get a tiny tip.

You left Megatron off that list. Why do you hate America Houngan?

[I]“You gotta pay the troll toll if you wanna get in this boy’s soul.” [/I]

Bravo! Or this, stolen from someone more clever as most good things are:

I was battered and bruised but the king was amused and before the siesta he made me his jester
and I found out soon that to be a buffoon was a serious thing as a rule!
For a jester’s chief employment is to kill himself for your enjoyment, and a jester unemployed is nobody’s fool!

Edit: more clever than myself, not Andrew, just to be clear.

Pillowpants

Hitler loved dogs. All night long.

You are not going to believe what Elias just told me. (O_O)

Not everyone who disagrees with you, and posts about it, is trolling. While easy in Games or Movies or something, it can be difficult to determine when that line is crossed in a P&R forum. We seem to have no trouble posting and responding to frequent and vitriolic personal insults, so what’s the harm in answering someone who is just trying to be edgy and controversial?

I don’t think there are any unbelievably skilled trolls so much as unbelievably annoying personalities and positions. Of course it’s all in the eye of the beholder. What I believe is far more common than intentional trolling in P&R is the kneejerk reaction of labelling somebody a troll just because they express an opinion that is either divergent from the groupthink or expressed in an annoying fashion.

The posters that have in the past appeared most troll-like in terms of the sort of responses they got were far more likely just social retards posting earnestly. People like Koontz, DeepT, Theodore Rex, and Dirt.

Mumm-Ra told him to!

Dirt may not be trolling all the time, but most of his posts in P&R are. DeepT was just socially retarded, and I’m not sure about the other two. I wouldn’t say the trolls here are “unbelievably skilled”, but they are persistent and get the reaction they’re looking for more often than not. You can generally tell a troll because they’ll post an inflammatory opinion, stick with it for a little while, and then disappear from the thread when people start coming back with solid evidence and good questions. An unbelievably skilled troll is able to keep up the bullshit indefinitely. We’ve had flashes of that, but nobody that can consistently do it.

I don’t enjoy getting trolled, but I do enjoy spectating so I’d have to disagree with the sentiment in the OP. A bad troll is tedious but a good troll is a work of art.

Now that’s just a bridge too far.

If you guys didn’t have trolls you’d have nothing to discuss.

It’s a public service.

Of course not. I never said they were.

We seem to have no trouble posting and responding to frequent and vitriolic personal insults, so what’s the harm in answering someone who is just trying to be edgy and controversial?

Well, trying to be edgy and controversial for its own sake is at best retarded and at worst a deliberate attempt at provoking a reaction, i.e. a troll. And I think you’ll find that off-topic vitriolic personal insults are kind of also trolling.

Oh, no doubt. That doesn’t mean P&R wouldn’t be better off without them, though.

Also, I honestly can’t believe none of you are on board with this idea. You’re seriously sitting there going “Man, fuck that, I like being trolled?”

It’s your own business if you want to not be trolled for a year. Go for it! The rest of us enjoy watching others get trolled, it’s entertaining.