Hey!
Folks a lot of us have seen a phenomenon on this board as of late that we have not seen since its inception.
Trolls and flames have become the order of the day. While this is standard practice on internet message boards, chat rooms, and news groups it has certainly cast an ugly shadow over our normal day to day interaction, and in fact caused an unpleasant wrinkle throughout the club.
By don't feed the trolls I of course mean try as hard as you can not to respond. A response it the only desired result. It does not matter if it is a lucid and intelligent response, a nasty and antagonistic response, an insult, or an agreement. It just wants a response. Any response. The troll is such a narcissist that it derives all of its pleasure from being the center of any attention. Not unlike a child who wants attention so badly they will break something just to get yelled at.
On my newsreader I can kill filter the trolls and flamers and not once be bothered by their interjections into what is otherwise typically a pleasant conversation. I'll goof around with the RC boards and see if that functionality exists here. I'll post an update to this thread if I find out anything interesting.
Trolls take a little while to starve to death, but not too long. Ignoring them may make them try harder, to scream louder, to become even more absurd and desperate to illicit a response. But that can only be fun for so long. Unfortunately the least bit of nourishment will prolong their life.
I am going to make a personal effort to discontinue my responses to trolls and flames within this forum.
This will no doubt be seen as the ultimate challenge to the trolls who will try as hard as they can to make me fail in that endeavor. Further, I would ask that other members of reef central join me in this effort to rid our mists of these unpleasant parasites
