trolls and all

There's been a bit of talk over at the board about trolls and similarly related issues. I'm sure the troll that's just been on the board is the same one that I mailed Kristi about last time he was on the board. She managed to ban him and delete the thread he'd started on his previous visit. Guess there was a hitch on the board last night because he got back in past the 3 posts a day limit that's set up for the first 15 posts. I know the 3 posts a day for a while limitation puts people off posting because it seems that you can't just post how you'd like for a while, but it stops spamming and it guards against impulse trolling. I'd noticed that the board had been a bit slow earlier when trying to post on the day that Beach tried to ban the guy, it'd worked when Kristi deleted his thread and banned him when he was using another account and profile to get onto the board a couple of weeks ago, so I guess when Beach tried there was some trouble that was related to the boards slowness when trying to post a bit earlier in the day because the banning thing for our board wasn't working.

She's just about to move so hasn't time to monitor the boards at the moment and lots of other people are working hard with other things going on in their lives right now or having a computer problems or away travelling or on holiday. So it's easier just to make the board private for a little while.

These troll infestations seem to happen from time to time and they go round a few boards so I guess one starts the others off or they all come from the same place. There used to be a board that produced a number of them and you'd get three or four of them travelling the boards. I didn't see what the one Sword of Honour warned Bb about because the thread he'd started had been deleted before I got back to the board after s/he'd posted. I miss some of them I guess because of the time difference between here and the States. I'm often sleeping while the trolls are out there posting on the boards if they're from America. so I miss the American ones if one of the admins gets in and decides to delete the whole thread before I've seen it. It was only because I was up in the early hours that I saw this last trolls other thread. I was the only person other than him on the board at the time and that's when I said that I wondered if he was a spacey alien because his observations didn't seem to have that much to do with women on this planet so wondered if he'd ever met any. He'd trotted out the same shit about women being parasites and not able to work without supervision that time too.

One thing I have noticed about people like him that come trolling the boards is that most don't seem to have much of a sense of good humour or imagination. This one seemed to make a habit of taking sentences from what had been written and using them as if they were his own thoughts. Heaven knows what would have happened if he'd been allowed to stay longer. He was disappearing too for short times on his second visit, I wondered if he was going back to another board, sort of simultaneous trolling. It's really best just to leave them,ignore the thread and delete and ban when a mod arrives. No good getting wound up about it, which I didn't. Just spent the time trying to engage him in pleasant conversation. He didn't even seem to be able to get into the fact that the conversation was slightly different from one that you might have thought he would expect. Which funily enough did make him sound a bit like a programme rather than a person.

I suppose it's still on the net somewhere, but there used to be a programme on the net where u could try and date one of the characters on the site which was infact a programme designed to answer your questions. I guess by having something like a lexicon in the programme. Can't remember that much about it now. One of the people I was on a message board with at the time found it, guess it was probably Metafilter, they often tend to find things like this. They were responsible for me finding Netives.I've totally forgiven them about that now. The dating thing was very clever though and funny at times because everyone started thinking up of questions that were guaranteed to get strange answers.

I hardly ever go back to Metafilter even to read now. But I have found two excellent general boards that I have't seen before, one's a UK board with lots of people posting which is cool because then you can go to board meets if you feel like it. Been to a couple of meets from another board and they were pretty funny and with this board, pretty good. If you've been a member of the board for a while and like the person it can seem surreal to be chatting with a person IRL you've only talked to on a message board before ...... but only for 30 seconds or something. You must be very careful with these things though because people can form any id over the internet over a period of time and manipulate you into trusting them.

It just made me think though that the type of behaviour the troll was showing makes other people a bit edgy and reduces trust. I know because talking this over and a couple of other things as well made me think about how it affects my behaviour too as well as other peoples.

Obviously some people leave no room for doubt. You know they are deliberately trying to upset you. Things like people who don't know you saying nasty things within your earshot just confirms that they are bullies. There are obvious things like that. And it's people like that who make it harder to trust other people. I guess that is part of their intention as well as hurting other people emotionally.

It's nothing I've ever done. Never had to because however bad my life has been I suppose I haven't felt any need to pry into other people's lives. I have my own life to live with my friends and acquiantances and hoping that we'll get along and that there won't be that many misunderstandings and quarrels and things. Otherwise I try to be friendly to other people and on a wider scale involve myself with human rights to fight abuse.

The talking on the board today and from a little while ago in private there too, in chat and things, made me realise how this does affect us sometimes and make us a bit more jumpy at times that we need to be with some of the people in our personal lives.