Deborah Day wrote:
Just out of interest, what exactly is a troll (in the flame sense?)
The online use of the term stems from the fishing practice known as trolling, which involves dragging a moving lure from a boat. It also has inevitably borrowed some connotation from the critter that lives under bridges and eats billy goats, though that's actually a completely unrelated word which just happens to be spelled the same.
Originally, to "troll" in a newsgroup was to make a deliberate misstatement (the lure), with the intention of trying to get overly enthusiastic posters (the fish) to jump in to correct and/or argue with you. It was, and often still is, a relatively good-natured game (by Usenet standards, anyway.) The trolls are usually not emotionally loaded, and the idea is to make them look as casual as possible.
Eventually, the term also came to be used for the decidedly *not* good-natured practice of making deliberately inflammatory statements (whether believed by the poster or not) in an attempt to stir people up and start a fight. This is more specifically known as "flamebaiting". Flamebaiters normally come in two persuasions: the ones who don't actually believe what they're saying (or don't care whether it's true or not) are generally just looking for attention; if you reply, you're giving them what they want. The ones who post bizarre, paranoid rants and *do* believe them are frequently emotionally unbalanced, if not actually mentally ill. There's not much you can do for that lot, but it's fairly pointless to try to hold a rational conversation with them, because they literally can't do it. Hence, in general, the best thing to do with a chronic flamebaiter is to ignore it.
- Lisa
-- Lisa Williams: lisa@eroicafans.org or lcw@dallas.net Lisa's Video Frame Capture Library: http://framecaplib.com/ From Eroica With Love: http://eroicafans.org/