forum enhancement suggestions

Posted by Foolness
Sep 13, 2012 at 03:37 PM

>How could somebody (except for the troll) really KNOW what the troll’s intentions are?

Analysis and history of trolls. It’s circular logic to any poster who’ve experienced trolls before plenty of times.

This and the above are unanimous similar method of troll detections. There’s even the classic flame warriors list of profiles which go into much more in-depth categorization than wikipedia’s albeit in a tongue in cheek manner.

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/

>What I find more suitable is “labeling” someone a troll depending on what he/she does:
>* Attack others. Defame others. Use offensive language.
> * Often write posts that are off-topic.

It’s very rare for trolls to really deviate nowadays from their profile and in cases where they do, the after effects are much obvious. Forum destruction. Forum invasion. Member recruitment. Arson. Personal crusade. DDOS attack. Spam. Even these have their own patterns.

The problem with why these tried and true definitions continue to fail is once again the broad stick.

For example, what is an attack? This leads to mob vs. mob accusations of who attacked whom. The after effect leading to more future paranoia which lead to more knee jerk reactions.

Defamation is up there with slander. In the internet, people that are the ones calling for such an accusation are often trolling and troll baiting through the use of flames.

Offensive language. Trolls don’t use offensive language. Trolls goad others to utter offensive languages. In cases where a troll is using offensive language, it is often because the troll knows he can hide behind a group.

Often writes off-topic post. Everyone does it and every person can deviate from it.

In fact even if this were to be the method of labelling a troll, far superior profiles have been done on the same issue elsewhere around web.

Instead of attacks, logical fallacies are used to reduce the broadness. In cases where a community is wise enough to even reduce further, accepting that logical fallacies could also be used by trolls, statements like dropping the subject is done with topic makers being given the ultimate benefit of the doubt and as Cassius said, posters simply being tasked to ignore the thread maker. People who breach beyond this are then categorized as trolls. This leads to the classic issue where if you can’t play nice, don’t play together at all.

Instead of defamation, most arbitration deal with contrast. That is to say, defamers are analyzed from the criteria of how they interact with other posters or the same posters in neutral settings. In cases where the contrast is the issue, the topic is treated as the problem and not any actual trolling where as if a poster attacks two posters using the same accusations and the same pattern of insult, then they are labeled a troll and judged as one.

Offensive language is treated on a case by case basis. Often the importance is on whether the callers for offensive language are offended by a word or by a post. In cases where it is the word, the word is changed/censored. In cases where it is the post, the moderation goes to whether the recipient is the one offended or whether others are calling for the head of a victim. The first scenario being the one that is actually considered trolling.

Finally all these, including off-topic posts, are analyzed from the stance of where the argument started as opposed to where the argument is ongoing. This is actually almost the better method most of the time rather than assigning arbitrary tags of when an off-topic post has gone too far because most trolls destroy the line on the root and then use the subsequent extended off-topic trail as cover ups or ways to goad.

Of course these are extremely unique forum to forum considering the number of communities around the internet but almost any neutral to good forum applies most of the above ways to deal with trolls regardless whether it is protocol or not. Troll behaviour is so old that in other forums this idea of labelling trolls would not lead to much anywhere but as a haven for trolls themselves to invest. If there’s one thing that separates trolls from provocative posters today it is that most professional trolls stick to their bee’s nest and when they move out of the group, they rely less on trolling tactics (setting aside joke trolls) but on the paranoia of others to goad people to accuse each other as trolls if only because these allows them to use less informed posters as pawns.

That’s why concern troll got it’s own section in the Wikipedia article I assume. The idea itself is very old and in terms of notability and damage, things such as astroturfing are way deserving of their own section but more and more trolls don’t play to be provocative. They play to goad. They know that the more they do this the more acceptable trolling sentences can be and the more they can reduce the chance of having their cover blown.

Here’s a few sentences showing how these long term effect have memefied into internet culture:

-popcorn eating (even in modern forums there used to be a time when this was considered flame baiting/in fact the implication is that posters are going to be helpless to stop trolling so they should just enjoy it)

-posting I’m sorry I didn’t read your post cause so and so (again text book flame baiting mixed with a disguised soft insult that have been memefied as normal joke posts)

-posting cool story bro (an example of positive goading/once again a textbook disguised troll phrase memefied into acceptable statements)

Each of these examples can be categorized under “posting for the lulz/lols”. Something that even in the pre-meme/imageboard modern forum days (as opposed to bbs and usenet) would often be rarely stated because of how they are obvious troll detectors. Today troll culture have made these statements become acceptable replies to waste a reply message box for precisely because trolls no longer/was never held down by protocols with such broad strokes. Even the profiles above are merely pickings for a true professional troll. (That is to say a true individual/minority group that rely less on mob appeal and more on their own tricks to survive banning including playing games of hide and seek with posters they think are easily provoked.)