Troll Tales

[Mr Silver]

A few years ago I moderated a web forum, not disimilar to TrekBBS although no where near as big, anyway Trolling was really prominent on this forum and the rules of discipline on this forum were clearly defined

1.) 3 Warnings results in a one week ban

2.) Sockpuppet accounts result in IP bans

3.) Repeated Warnings result in Permabans

So whats the problem? Well the rules were very relaxed, the administrator asked for leinancy from the mod team (he also liked to argue with Trolls in their respective threads)..thus many interesting threads were born, Trolls became prominent members and very few bans were given out, soon the forums were riddled with nonsensical, albeit some humorus threads

I've noticed that on TrekBBS, in the past there have been members considered to be "Trolls" and because of this many humorous incidents have occured

So the purpose of this thread is to share stories about trolling incidents that have occured on forums you visit


(for the benefit of keeping the peace, please don't identify the trolls or accuse current members of TrekBBS of acting like "Trolls", merely sharing stories behind interesting threads and repeated Trolling that have occured in the past or on other forums will suffice...after all its all in the spirit harmless fun)

 

[Mr Silver]

Ok i'll share one of my favourites

The board in question was a Lost board, This happened during the haitus period of Season 2 and 3, now for those of you unfamiliar with Lost, it has a vast Internet fan community and several theories were formed about whats happening in the show, anyway around this time a poster joined and started a thread claiming that they had inside information about the show, they allowed members to ask questions and they would answer, if they had information to available to answer...naturally several members called BS, however this user posted answers, that were still fair game at this point in the show, one such question asked was:

Poster: "Where do the others live on the island?"

Troll: "The others live where the Dharma Initiative lived, in a residential compound surrounded by a fence that keeps the Smoke Monster out...
(now that sounds pretty correct..however many people speculated this and its about to get obscure)

...The buildings in this compound are trasnsparent, the others don't believe in secrets and neither did the Dharma Initiative...in the middle of the compound, where the Others true leader "Alvar Hanso" (false) resides. Inside is a laboratory that houses several mechanisms designed to control the weather on the island".. (and such on the like)

The troll continued to post up until after Season 3 began and naturally their suspected BS was confirmed, being confronted in their thread, (which was stickied...) they claimed that "The writers had rewritten the season to protect the show", stemming from the leaks that they and other insiders had published...anyway later they began to offer "Set Photos" that looked legit, however a sharp member pointed out that they were more than likely photoshopped (stemming from some oddities about the pictures...which I have to admit were very well done), sure enough this was confirmed, once again the Troll protested their legitimacy by claiming that "They were unused scenes and would be included in the Season 3 DVD as deleted scenes"

It gets stranger...the troll began to post more set photos and around this time we saw a soar in new members, such members that just happened to post in every topic that the troll started, their comments were almost universally positive and so I pm'd the troll informing them that "Sockpuppet" accounts were prohibited, they denied this and following a lengthy pm'd discussion between myself, the troll, another mod and the admin, the troll claimed that he was male, aged 24 and worked as an assistant on the set of Lost...Since he couldn't prove these claims and his constant posting of fake information and coupled with the flaming that went on when frustrated users cried BS, the admin decided to ban him, funnily enough we couldn't IP ban him, since it wouldn't show up, we decided to monitor the situation, banning his sockpuppets, which all had different IP addresses (likely due to proxy servers)

We didn't hear anything for him for around 3 months, then a new member joined, this new member had almost an identical style of writing to the troll, it was only a matter of time before things got out of hand...this new member started to hint things about his identity, we had around 400 replies (within a week) in this latest thread, several members used it as an opportunity to bash the troll, meanwhile, the troll finished his game of "Guess Who", suggesting that he was in actual fact Damon Lindelof (one of Lost's showrunners..) again many members cried BS, however we weren't taking any chances, we've had members from the TV Industry on our board and have banned a couple not realising they were the real deal (similar to a case on this board, which we won't mention)..our admin emailed Damon Lindelof's management and explained the situation...sure enough the management denied Damon had joined our board so we immediately banned the "Damon Troll" (who had this time failed to mask his IP address)...needles to say we never heard from him again...

This started a board meme, where members of the board would play "Lost" guess who and then reveal who they were while also sharing some completely bogus information

 

[SVD]

On a ceretain fan wiki a couple of years back, I bore witness to some ugliness. A user (call him User), often engaged in flaming, using profanity, and harassing others on talk pages, at one point harassing one of the admins (I'll call him Admin1, for short). Admin1 bans User, who subsequently digs, and starts intensly harasing Admin1 and his family (Admin1's real life was hardly compartmentalized from his Internet life). Part of his harrasment included flooding that wiki with sock-puppet accounts, with flames directed at Admin1 as the user-names. After a few months of banning the sock-puppets and the IP's used for them and User's original name, the fiasco gradually quieted.

Lots of negative energy was emanating from the site for those few months.

 

[TheGodBen]

meanwhile, the troll finished his game of "Guess Who", suggesting that he was in actual fact Damon Lindelof (one of Lost's showrunners..) again many members cried BS, however we weren't taking any chances, we've had members from the TV Industry on our board and have banned a couple not realising they were the real deal (similar to a case on this board, which we won't mention)..our admin emailed Damon Lindelof's management and explained the situation...sure enough the management denied Damon had joined our board so we immediately banned the "Damon Troll" (who had this time failed to mask his IP address)...needles to say we never heard from him again...

This reminds me of the story of what happened when Aaron Sorkin, creator and head writer of The West Wing, started posting on the Television Without Pity forums. (I wasn't there, I read about it afterwards.)

Apparently he posted there infrequently talking about the show, and most members of the site were fans so everything went quite well. Then, at the Emmys, he and Rick Cleveland won for best writing in a drama series for the episode In Excelsis Deo, but Sorkin hogged the mike when making the acceptance. Rick was annoyed by this because he had told Aaron that he wanted to speak and dedicate the episode to his father, and when the fans on TWoP found out about this they asked Aaron why he didn't let Rick speak. Aaron responded by being very dismissive of Rick's work on the episode and claimed that he writes all the episodes and that Rick's name was only on the script because Aaron was gracious enough to give him co-writer credit. People started pointing out to him that guild rules don't allow for Aaron to do that, that for Rick to have his name on the script it meant that he had to be involved in writing it, and that Aaron's claim was absurd.

Aaron came back and said that Rick wrote the original draft for the episode, which had the First Lady looking for a missing cat, and that Aaron rewrote it and turned it into an emotional episode about a Korean veteran that died at Christmas. Then Rick showed up on the site and rebuffed Aaron's claims saying that he was the one responsible for the veteran story because it was based on his father, who was a veteran of the Korean war that died in a flophouse. At this point, some newspapers picked up on the fact that Aaron Sorkin was on a fansite insulting writers he used to work with, and once that happened he was forced to apologise to Rick in order to make the bad news story go away.

Later, in the third season, he wrote an episode containing this subplot about internet fandoms. Apparently, the people on the TWoP forums weren't happy about it.

 

[T'Bonz]

I love TWoP!

There are trolls and there are trolls. Some are harmless and amusing, others are fucking assholes and/or destructive. You can imagine which type I prefer. I've run across all types in my ten years online (not just here).

 

[Mr Silver]

I wonder what makes a troll tick?

I noticed a couple of months ago a prominent surge of "(insert name) is gay" threads, while some people may have legitimate interests in figuring out homoerotic undertones between Trek characters, its also a common focal point for trolling, in my experience of Web Forums, Trolls like to create topics based around

*Homosexuality
*War History
*Racism
*Foilers (fake spoilers, information about tv shows, films ,etc)

 

[Udat]

I`m loving this thread......