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.
It is generally very easy to troll any one of several hundreds of support forums on CureZone. As the majority of support forums on CureZone are about alternatives to commercialized medicine, all you have to do to start a flaming thread questioning the main subject of discussion and to provoke insults from hard core proponents. It has been done every few weeks. It is strictly against our rules!
Initiating debates on CureZone support forums is strictly against the rules.
CureZone has plenty of debate forums where those interested in questioning can have free rain.
Even debate forums on CureZone can be trolled by name calling and by provoking name calling. Those trolls are quickly banned from CureZone.
He (and in 90% of cases it is he) tries to start arguments and upset people.
Sometimes, he is skeptical, trying to scare people, trying to plant fear in their hearts. Many curezone trolls are people trying to promote Quackwatch / ratbags agenda through fear mongering.
For many trolls, lack of hard evidence about any therapy equals "DANGER". He will try to scare people from even trying the therapy just because there is no hard evidence that therapy is more effective then placebo.
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.
Trolling is a form of harassment that can take over a discussion. Well meaning defenders can create chaos by responding to trolls. The best response is to ignore it, or to report a message to a forum moderator. CureZone moderators usually delete troll messages or block trolls. Negative emotions stirred up by trolls leak over into other discussions. Normally affable people can become bitter after reading an angry interchange between a troll and his victims, and this can poison previously friendly interactions between long-time users.
Finally, trolls create a paranoid environment, such that a casual criticism by a new arrival can elicit a ferocious and inappropriate backlash.
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.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge for a webmaster is deciding whether to take steps against a troll that a few people find entertaining. Some trolls do have a creative spark and have chosen to squander it on being disruptive. There is a certain perverse pleasure in watching some of them. Ultimately, though, the webmaster has to decide if the troll actually cares about putting on a good show for the regular participants, or is simply playing to an audience of one -- himself.
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 alert!!!
