Posted by timothy on Saturday November 10, @10:31AM from the tentative-steps dept. Guppy06 writes: "According to this article at CNN, Congress has approved $30 million for the bastard stepchild that is the Pluto-Kuiper Express probe. Originally slated for a 2004 launch, it's now pushed back to 2006, the last possible date to launch while Jupiter is in the right place and Pluto's atmosphere is still an atomsphere. After being snubbed by NASA and then by the Bush administration (and in light of the recent budgeting complaints), it remains to be seen if NASA will actually go ahead with it."
Pluto-Kuiper Express A Go (Again... For Now...) | Preferences | Top | 4 comments | Search Discussion Threshold: -1: 4 comments 0: 3 comments 1: 2 comments 2: 2 comments 3: 0 comments 4: 0 comments 5: 0 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) Save: The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Ass Penetration. (Score:-1, Troll) by forkspoon on Saturday November 10, @11:27AM (#2548413) (User #116573 Info) Hasn't this mission been on and off for years? It seems worthwhile, if only to get close-ups of Pluto.
Cool (Score:0, Offtopic) by p3d0 on Saturday November 10, @12:37PM (#2548539) (User #42270 Info | http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~doylep) Interesting experiment: post a reasonable-souding article with a troll subject line, and see what the moderators do.
The only trouble is that your post is content-free, so this is an unmitigated troll. However, I don't feel like wasting my mod points on it.
Posted two days ago (Score:2, Informative) by Man of E on Saturday November 10, @12:07PM (#2548465) (User #531031 Info | http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 11, @01:22PM) Isn't this exactly the same story as this one [slashdot.org] posted two days ago? That story was both about this Pluto mission and the development of the Mars program, but a lot of the issues with Pluto have already been discussed.
[ Reply to This | Parent ] A Few Points (Score:2, Interesting) by CheshireCatCO (weissj@nospam.colorado.edu) on Saturday November 10, @12:07PM (#2548466) (User #185193 Info | http://bogart.colorado.edu/~weissj/cyrano.html) "Bastard stepchild..." The PKE was much too expensive. But, then, it was JPL's project, so no one was shocked at that. NASA was wise to have farmed it out for competing bids from other groups. And, in fact, the other groups are able to do at least as much (probably more) for less than JPL could. So calling it a 'bastard stepchild' seems unnecessarily derisive to me.
The 2006 launch date is not critical. One of the two competing team leaders has worked out that with Venus gravity assists, we could send a probe to Pluto in any given year. Furthermore, in reviewing the recent papers on the topic, he's determined that it is quite unlikely that the atmosphere will freeze out as was predicted a decade or two ago.
Link to IPC benchmarks (Score:1) by markaa on Tuesday November 13, @08:33PM (#2561117) (User #311298 Info) For the actual data, go here [ibm.com]. [ Reply to This | Parent ] tacosnot es aqui??? (Score:-1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13, @08:36PM (#2561129) que es esto tacosnot??? donde esta sen~or cmdrtaco???? [ Reply to This | Parent ] I am as confused as heck (Score:1) by not_cub on Tuesday November 13, @08:37PM (#2561133) (User #133206 Info) 1. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source;) " says Timothy of slashdot, home of slack journalism and one-sided reporting. So, I don't believe a word he says, and I won't question the source.
2. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source;) " says Timothy of slashdot, and I believe him. I will question every source. Goto 1.
"Taco-snotting" is a term used by CmdrTaco to refer to the practice of sucking off a homosexual man and blowing the semen back out his nose onto his partner's face or body. Usually a long stream of semen is left on CmdrTaco's face, dribbling out of his nose, leading it to look like a large snot. Hence the term, "Taco-snotting."
Why am I getting emails from CmdrTaco asking me if I would enjoy a round of "Taco-snotting" with him?
You may have recently received an email similar to the following:
From: cmdrtaco@slashdot.org To: wipotroll@hotmail.com Subject: Hey, baby - jion me in a taco-snott!:)
Hey, baby!
Ever done a Taco-snotting with anothar fellow geek? Its more fun then trolling Slashdot, trust me! All that talk you troll with about homasexual incest and stuff got me all horny and hot for you! Is it serius? Please tell me that itt is! If you want to get with me and my Slashdot bois, drop me an emale!
ps- Please replie to me at horny_rob_6969@hotmail.com. I'd rather the guys at VA Linux are not seen this.:):)
-- CmdrTaco (cmdrtaco@slashdot.org)
You most likely accidentally forgot to uncheck the "Willing to Taco-snot" checkbox in your preferences. Whenever CmdrTaco gets bored, he roams through the database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy a Taco-snotting with him. And this time, he found you. To disable this setting, log in, go to your user page, click on You, and uncheck the box next to "Willing to Taco-snot." Of course, CmdrTaco's probably already got the hots for your semen, so it's probably too late.
Can I stop receiving emails from CmdrTaco?
Probably. If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, he might leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object to ward off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot you, he might chain you up in his basement and use you as his sex toy/slave for the rest of your life, or until he accidentally drowns you in cum while using you as his sex pony in a "circle-snot."
What is a "Circle-snot"?
A "circle-snot" is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk: When CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel, and Homos get together and Taco-snot each other's gooey, hot, sticky cum on each other's faces and bodies until they're covered with sticky, sweet man juice. Roblowme usually provides the extra lubricant; he owns a limo service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease. To complete the circle, Michael, Timothy, and Jamie sometimes join in, dressed in full Gestapo uniforms complete with Nazi regalia, and proceed to snot each other's cum and whip each other's asses with riding crops and cattleprods until their pasty, white geek bodies are exhausted from all the passionate, homosexual revelry.
Does Jon Katz get involved in this? I thought he was a paedophile, not a homosexual.
Actually, he's a homosexual paedophile. He's also a coprophiliac. Jon Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesn't involve himself in circle-snots. Mr. Katz usually engages in a game called "Katz juicy-douching" with his harem of little boys, which involves administering an enema to himself of little-boy urine, spooging the vile muck from his ass into a plastic bag, then slathering the goo all over his little boy's chained up and naked bodies.
CowboyNeal SpeaksPosted by Roblimo on Friday February 23, @02:00PM from the greatful-dead-fans-need-love-too dept. After several years of reader requests, we finally cornered CowboyNeal long enough to do a Slashdot interview. Questions were posted last week. Today we brush aside the mask (or at least the hat) and get a glimpse of the real Jon Pater (aka CowboyNeal).
1) Karma? by glowingspleen
Since you're probably the only one with real access to all the user records, you're the one to ask:
Who among us is the current Karma Whore King, and what is their score? Is there a maximum amount of karma one can earn?brAnd finally, is there a cutoff level where you auto-post at 3 or above?
CowboyNeal:
Wow, a question about karma, what I consider to be the most boring subject in all of Slashdot. I dunno who is the Karma Whore King, since we instituted a karma cap at 50, and all karma levels that are above 50 are living on borrowed time. Getting a karma above 20 allows one to post with a +1 bonus, and from there on there are no rewards.
I said that karma bores me, and I don't understand why people get all hung up over it. It's not like having a high karma is gonna get you discounts in stores. If you're really worried about karma, go donate money to charity or donate your time to some place that can use it. I guarantee the reward will be better than anything that Slashdot karma can get you.
2) Give us the ups and downs! by Dino
What's the best thing that happened to you since Slashdot started? Conversly, what's the worst?
CowboyNeal:
Easily, the best part was when I got a real job out of it. I had done a few odds and ends for BSI and Slashdot before coming on full time, but getting a check on a regular basis is something I still am thankful for. The worst part is probably the sheer volume of email that I get to deal with on a daily basis. That's not to say that I dislike the people that email me, but it gets troublesome when one has an inbox that can take up to half a day daily to get squared away.
3) A User Info slashbox? by update()
Like a lot of people, I bet, I frequently look at my user info page to see if there have been responses to my posts, and what moderations I have received. Would it be possible to provide a Slashbox with that information on the main page?
CowboyNeal:
This kind of thing could be implemented, but with our current setup it just wouldn't scale. It would need to add another query to viewing the home page, for each person that has it chosen. There might be a few tricks to implement this that could save some overhead, but if I were to make such a box, it definitely wouldn't happen until after Slashdot is running bender, the new development branch of Slashcode.
4) Slashdot by emmons
How did you become tangled up in this Slashdot thing with that CmdrTaco guy? How did you guys meet?
CowboyNeal:
I met both Rob and Jeff when all of us where freshmen in college. Rob was in the same Health Dynamics (read, Phys. Ed.) class I was, and Jeff and I shared a lab bench in Chemistry Lab. The CS department at Hope wasn't that large, and most CS majors were aware of Chips & Dips, and would read it regularly. When I graduated, I was approached by Blockstackers, who owned Slashdot at the time, and offered a job. About two months later, Slashdot was acquired by Andover.Net (now OSDN) and my employment was transferred to them.
5) Yes! by OlympicSponsor
I've been following CowboyNeal's career for years, reading everything he writes, watching all of his movies and eating all of his cooking. Now I finally have a chance to ask him the question that's been burning me up inside: What's Taco really like?
Seriously, can you give us a breakdown of how much time each editor spends actually reading the site they nominally run? Like, time spent clicking on user comments?
CowboyNeal:
Hrm, it sounds like you might have me confused with someone else. I've never made any movies or had a restaurant *grin*. Honestly, I don't know how much time an editor spends doing those tasks. I would assume it varies from person to person, but I don't share office space with hardly any of them, nor do any of them ever have to report to me.
I know from our internal discussion lists and channels, that all of us are constantly reading the site, but as for a detailed breakdown, I'd have no idea where to start.
6) The future by yamla
What will you be doing in five years? In ten years? If you expect/hope to still be with Slashdot, what sort of changes do you see happening to Slashdot in that time?
And yes, I know 5 - 10 years is an eternity.
CowboyNeal:
5 - 10 years is an eternity! I don't even know what I'm doing two weeks from now!
I wish I knew. I was the kid in school who when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, didn't have the slightest clue. When I finally discovered computers, I knew that I wanted to work with computers in some capacity for a living. When I think about how much technology has advanced since I first started using a computer, it's truly amazing how far we've come. I'm hoping that someday we can put all this patent/copyright/intellectual property BS behind us, and by that time someone will have discovered the secret to putting infinite bandwidth into everyone's homes and with all of these new resources at our disposal, someone will discover the new killer app for all of it, repeat ad infinitum. That's how the system works. I just hope to be there and be a part of the process somehow. I think it's especially interesting how the internet and all of what it entails has made it easier for people to communicate and become exposed to experiences and views they normally wouldn't, so any new advances will hopefully only improve that.
I don't think Slashdot will do anything like try to take over all forms of media or any sort of grand scheme like that because there's already organizations into that sort of thing. I do think, however, that if a new way of delivering content that replaces or augments the web comes about, that we will most likely be there.
This is probably the best question I've been asked, because it was easily the toughest for me to answer. My job now is primarily the day-to-day maintenance of Slashdot, which means that I'm not usually concerned with looking to the future, but rather just making sure that our current system runs smoothly. In short, I'm not a leader but a follower.
7) What was your fav poll abuse? by chabotc
What poll in which you were an 'option', did you find most amusing/entertaining?
What was the most depressing?
CowboyNeal:
The first few times I was a poll option I thought it was funny, but I have become rather immune to it now. Now it's to the point where I'm surprised when I am not an option. As for trying to pick out particular polls that amused or depressed me, I can't really remember any.
8) tell us the truth by segmond
How often have you posted anonymously? do you have a pseudo handle? Have you ever trolled? Are you getting bored with slashdot? What is the biggest screw up that you did to the site that we never found out? Have you ever used "super moderating power" to mod down posts attacking slashdot editors...? What is your favorite pizza topping and sandwich?
CowboyNeal:
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
That should bring me up to the "screw up" question, so I will now relate a story that showcases my stupidity. One day I was working on Slashdot's database, and cleaning up a lot of old database entries, when I suddenly realized I'd forgotten a "WHERE" clause in one of the SQL statements.
Unfortunately, this was after the statement had already run, and the blocks table was completely wiped out. If you know anything about Slashcode, you know that blocks holds everything from color schemes, to the slashboxes, the HTML that gives the site its look and feel, to all the headlines that go into the slashboxes on the right side of the homepage. Of course, this brought the site to a halt until we could restore from backup. I was able to berate myself before anyone else could, though, so anyone in the know about my mistake was fairly forgiving.
As for "super moderating power", I know I could go into the database and moderate like crazy, but my ethics won't allow me to do so. Also, I don't usually read comments attached to stories. I have banned IP addresses from which people have been hammering on the site with scripts at the rate of several requests a second, but I don't actively moderate any stories.
I don't know if I have a favorite pizza topping. I used to work at a pizza place when I was in high school, and learned to like almost every pizza topping there is, even anchovies.
My favorite sandwich is easily a veggie submarine. I'm not a vegetarian, but I find myself ordering veggie subs more than any other sandwich.
9) Anime by spudwiser
Seeing as in most Geeks in Space episodes Anime quotes and quips spew forth from you, I think we the listeners (and deranged readers) should see exactly how your background in anime developed.
CowboyNeal:
Well, this answer is pretty boring. One day in college my friend and I decided we should watch some anime, because we had heard it was cool. So we took a week, and rented a movie or two per night, starting with Ghost In The Shell, then moving on to Akira, Fist Of The North Star, and Vampire Hunter D. I think those are the anime titles everyone starts with, because they're available at almost any Blockbuster.
But yeah, we discovered we liked it, and I just started watching more anime. I warned that this answer was boring.
10) Stories by Fervent
Why don't you yourself ever post any stories, Cowboy Neal?
CowboyNeal:
Oh, but I do. On the rare occasion that we get to record an episode of Geeks In Space I'll post the announcement in the radio section. Sometimes a story falls through the cracks and I'll pick it up, also, but that happens much less often lately. Rob and Jeff like to say that the surefire way to not get a story posted is to email it directly to them instead of using the submissions bin, but if you want to absolutely sure your story doesn't get posted to the site, email me it to me instead. *grin*
State of the
TacoPosted by CmdrTaco on Monday
August 16, @10:29AM from the dept. Why is
it that my personal value as a human being is always tied 100% to the status of
my server. Since last week the box has been cranky (a blown power supply,
resulted in the harddrive being happily moved to a machine with 128 megs less
RAM, which means the whole thing is just sluggish as hell today. And suddenly I
feel like shit. I feel tired unhealthy, and burnt out. A few weeks ago, I was on
top of the world: the machine was stable, kicking out 640,000 pages in one day,
and performing snappy for everyone. And I was cheerful. Its really strange that
a chunk of steel and silicon 3 time zones away defines my mood.
Why I do not like Trolls
I believe I have made it clear, through my
consistant down modding and IP banning of trolls, that I do not like trolls very
much. I believe that Trolls are the most offensive type of human that we have
ever seen. One can only assume that thier only purpose is to upset people, get
reactions from people, and to humiliate people.
Here recently, the
trolls have been focusing thier attacks more specifically the moderators and
editors of this web site. I must say, that I have read such horrible postings
from these trolls that, quite frankly, I am offended. I mean sure, there are a
lot of people here who do not like JonKatz for one reason or another (mine is
that he tends to post stories that are uninformed and ignorant, but that's
beside the point.), but that is no reason for us to flame him so much every time
he posts some stupid story. The fact is that myself, Hemos, JonKatz, cowboyNeal,
Neal, michael, timothy, Roblimo, Cliff, HeUnique, sengan, emmitt, justin++,
nate, and many others are all authors for this web site and you should start
showing us just a little respect. I mean, it may be fun to make up little songs
like the one posted here [slashdot.org] But it still hurts our feelings to see this sort of stuff. Our
jobs are tough, and stuff like this just doesn't make it any easier. To think
that we all spend so much of our time maintaining this web site just for you
trolls to troll it up. Comments about me and JonKatz being homosexual partners
or me and Hemos. Now, I am not going to say that these things are false, but
there is no way that you guys actually know that about us, and it is none of
your business either. Yes, it is true that I, CmdrTaco, am a homosexual, and a
big one at that. Yes it is true that some times JonKats and I will be alone for
extended periods of time. Sometimes, as we work together, he will brush up
against me and I can't help but want to be alone with him. And don't get me
started on micheal. But that's not my point at all. Some of your trolls don't
even make sense. I mean, how many times can LinuxIsForAssholes post Can you
imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?? Or how do Trollaxor and Trolligula and
all the others keep coming up with these true stories about my homosexuality?
All you trolls use this link [goatse.cx] in many
of your trolls, why? Do you like that site? Did they get my good side? It is a
good picture of me, but again, that's not my point. And what about all those
damn trolls asking how we can be talking about things like the AOTC trailer in
the wake of Sept. 11. The fact is, Slashdot doesn't care. We don't care how many
people lost thier lives. All the innocent people. The only thing we even wonder
is if some of the people were checking out Slashdot at the time of the attack.
Oh, the other thing that sucks is that when the buildings went down we lost some
companies that had Linux installations. Does that make us bad people, maybe.
Does it make our bank accounts bigger through our constant advertising for
stupid worthless producs? Most definatly.
Now, you people who have a
different opinion than that which is expressed by the editors, prepare to be
modded down. We don't like people who do not agree with our ignorant opinions.
We want to silence you. You see, if you are silenced then the discussion is only
done by those who all agree. When someone with a mind of thier own disagrees and
comes on our website and see's that we all have the same opinion, then they will
believe that our opinion must be right. It's kinda like Hitler during WWII. If
you have a different opinion, you will be killed. You see enough people killed,
you change your opinion. We like to think of ourselves as Borg. We are but 1
collective, none of which has a mind of thier own. People are a lot safer that
way.
All in all, you can call use as many names as you want, but when it
comes down to it, we (the editor) as just as much Trolls as you are. We are
trolls with a different agenda. Our agenda is global mind control, and we want
to stop you from letting thses people know that original thoughts are natural.
We want them to think originality is a sign of weakness and stupidity.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds
of threads under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the
idea that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator division.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc. Writing with a
followup to the Slashdot post titled, "Who
Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared" Splinton had this to say: "In this
article, Ed
Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's critical sections.
Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are twice as fast again!"
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP
closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was
unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation.
This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and
they were part of the cut.
This article explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready
to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it
out.
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines...
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites having
been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another such project.
The HETE-2 satellite recently located a cosmic
gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot of help from friends) an
afterglow was detected, identifying its source. HETE-2 cost $26 million, only
1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.
A lot of
commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack,
but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by
using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts),
and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help
reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical
thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the
application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather
than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as
possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of
specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and
technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the
knowledge gaps."
Posted by
timothy on Tuesday
November 13, @07:59PM
from the cheapness-is-good dept.
Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds of threads
under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the idea
that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator
division.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc.
Writing with a followup to the Slashdot post titled,
"Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared"
Splinton had this to say: "In
this article, Ed Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's
critical sections. Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are
twice as fast again!"
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while
back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's
calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have
thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that
management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.
This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based
PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds
interesting? Go check it out.
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines...
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites
having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another
such project. The HETE-2
satellite recently
located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot
of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source.
HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a "small" scientific satellite
normally costs.
A lot of commercial "off the shelf" technology went into HETE. Nothing
from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard.
You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by
using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by
using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts
best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts
selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as
one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting
selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a
team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a
large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of
the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected
engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother? dmarsh writes: "This
new
article from C|Net seems to be a
total contradiction to last week's
"Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the
important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual
survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at
least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source;)
<
Light Emitting Pictures On Standard Inkjet Printer
I just went to Airline International. They tried to throw me out due to my many visible tatoos. After I showed them I emmense wad of moola, they heartilly invited me in. I asked if they had the above items because I want to grow up to be just like Montie Burns. The only item they had was a three pack of Grizzly Bear Underwear. I have them on right now, they're a mite itchy.
I am gonna see if Taco likes them later when I go over to give him his afternoon fucking.
SourceForge dying Over the past few months the SourceForge development facility, which hosts a large number of Free Software projects, has changed its policies. Features for exporting a project from SourceForge have been removed. The implementation used to be exclusively Free Software but is now based on non-free software. Finally, VA Linux[1] has become rather underhand in their attempts to grasp exclusive control of contributors' work.
SourceForge did a lot of good for the Free Software community, but it's now time to break free.
Locking users in a non-free software world
SourceForge brought to Free Software a unified and standard development methodology based on modern tools. Before SourceForge, such tools (bug tracking, cvs, web, support, forums, polls, news, etc.) were available individually, but few developers used many of them together, because they had to set up the combined facilities on their own. SourceForge made the combination conveniently available for both new and experienced developers.
Because of the convenience of SourceForge, many Free Software developers have come to take this collection of features for granted, and would be reluctant to go back to the old way of doing things. Unfortunately, this means that when SourceForge itself takes a turn for the worse, it tends to pull Free Software developers down with it.
The second important thing SourceForge did was to provide this environment based exclusively on Free Software. By doing this, SourceForge not only provided a powerful methodology for the Free Software community, it also demonstrated what Free Software could do, and promoted the use of Free Software. And since the special software for SourceForge was itself free, anyone could set up a similar site. The SourceForge software became permanently available to developers everywhere. Developers in (say) India who can't afford the bandwidth to use the SourceForge site could have the benefit of the same features on their own server.
In August 2001, VA Linux reversed those policies and introduced non-free software on the SourceForge server. In announcing this (the original document was removed or moved shortly after the publication of this article), Larry Augustin (VA Linux CEO) claims that SourceForge.net users will "see virtually no changes". That may be true if they narrow their vision and consider only what job the site does and how to operate it. But when we consider the implications, things are very different now. Instead of a showcase for Free Software, SourceForge is now a demo site for non-free software. There is a danger that the many thousands of people registered on SourceForge will become increasingly hooked on the SourceForge site and on features implemented by proprietary software.
As a Free Software developer, you are still free to use the SourceForge server, but you won't have the freedom to copy, modify, study and distribute the software it runs; you won't be free to set up a similar site yourself, or adapt it to your own needs. The last published release of the SourceForge software is one year old.
The move to non-free software was the culmination of a series of steps designed to lock users in. There never was a way to fully extract projects from SourceForge, but efforts were made in this direction--then this year they were removed. At present the only things you can get are the CVS tree and tracker data/export/sf_tracker_export.php. Few people are aware of the later because it is undocumented. The export page explains how to use scripts that don't exist anymore; implementation of facilities to ease project extraction was stopped. The developer community is exclusively made of VA Linux employees and a few people who are asked not to disclose the current code.
The mailing lists archives, a major service of SourceForge recently became unmaintained. Will it be replaced by a non-free software based solution ?
Contributors' work appropriation
Here is what happened to me shortly before the announcement that SourceForge would use and develop non-free software. Because I'm listed as a contributor (in the sources and documentation) to the SourceForge software, I received a request from VA Linux to assign copyright to them. I was not surprised or unhappy with this; many Free Software projects ask contributors to assign copyright of their changes to the main author. Assigning copyright to a single holder is a strategy for defending the GNU GPL more effectively, and I would have been happy to cooperate in that regard.
But when I read the details of their copyright assignment, I saw major problems. I was asked to assign copyright of my work that "is, or may in the future be, utilized in the SourceForge collaborative software development platform". The assignment was not limited to my contribution to the SourceForge code, it potentially covered all my past and future work if it was of some interest to SourceForge.
I was also expecting a promise that my work would be released under the GNU GPL, but the assignment said nothing about Free Software. VA Linux would be allowed to release the software I wrote under a non-free software license and not let the community have it at all. But I wasn't sure at the time if this was a real concern, because VA Linux only produced and used Free Software. Two weeks later they decided to introduce non-free software on SourceForge and that cast a different light on the question.
VA Linux told me that they only sent the assignment to two people, in the hope to refine it. We started a long discussion that lasted two months. I assumed this discussion was to make the copyright assignment more palatable to the Free Software community, so I worked hard to give constructive feedback. Finally I was sent the version of the copyright assignment produced by the legal department. I quote it here in its entirety:
SourceForge Copyright Assignment
Thank you for your interest in contributing software code to SourceForge.
In order for us to include the code in our product, we will need you to provide us with the rights to the code.
By signing this agreement, you, the undersigned, hereby assign to VA Linux all right, title and interest in and to the software code described below, and all copyright, patent, proprietary information, trade secret, and other intellectual property rights therein. You also agree to take all actions and sign all documents (such as copyright assignments or registrations) reasonably requested by VA Linux to evidence and record the above assignments.
This was even more of a power grab than the first draft. "You give us total control; we promise nothing". At this point, I knew that the attempts to clarify the copyright assignment were a waste of time; VA Linux clearly wasn't collecting copyright assignments in order to enforce the GNU GPL.
Escape entrapment
It's time for people who value freedom to escape from SourceForge. It has become a tar pit from which escape will become increasingly difficult. Development hosting platforms based completely on Free Software flourish all over the world. You can create your own, join an existing one or help write the underlying software. Some months ago I helped to launch Savannah for the GNU project because I felt the need of a collaboratively run platform. With friends and co-developpers we are now re-writing and packaging distributed development hosting software. The idea is to be able to install and operate a SourceForge-like site within hours. Savannah will run this software at the end of this year. At first it may have less functionality than SourceForge, but it has a bright future because it is rooted in a cooperative effort of people sharing Free Software.
SourceForge is free as in free beer because it was designed this way. It was a very expensive and ephemeral gift to the Free Software community. We could resent VA Linux for such a poisoned gift. On the contrary I think we should thank them. They brought us methodology, and taught us that a development hosting facility must be built in a distributed and collaborative way, not by a single company controlling everything from top to bottom. Of course that means everyone needs to spend a little time developing and maintaining these hosting facilities. We've finished our beer, it's time to win our freedom.
Hey dipshit! The current UID's are only up to ~.5M, you are off by a factor of 100! Climb off that/. bandwagon and relearn the decimal numbering system...
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.
HAHAHAHAA fuckers! I am not ssooo wrong I can't recover! All your trolls are belong to... forget it...
Q: What do you call a 30week-old premee?
A: An Appetizer!
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying in a ditch?
A: Phil
Q: What is special about a dead baby over all other forms of life
A: You can achieve deep throat from whichever way you enter
Q: How are babies and the elderly alike?
A: Both are fun to throw out of moving cars.
Q: What's red and dances
A: A baby on a barbecue
Q: Whats worse than finding 7 dead babies in 1 trash can?
A: Finding 1 dead baby in 7 trash cans.
Q: What's the difference between a Dead Baby and a tree?
A: One is legal to hit with an AX.
Q: What bounces up and down at 100mph?
A: A baby tied to the back of a truck.
Q: What's brown and gurgles?
A: A baby in a casserole.
Q: Whats the best thing about a siamese twin baby?
A: Threesomes.
Q: What do you get when you have sex with a pregnant woman?
A: A baby with a black eye!
Q: What's blue and flies around the room at high speeds?
A: A baby with a punctured lung.
Q: What's red and goes round and round?
A: A baby in a garbage disposal.
Q: What's the difference between a gay man and a freezer?
A: You can't hide dead babies in a gay man.
Q: What's more fun than strapping a baby to a washingline and then spinning it around at 200km/h?
A: Stopping it with a shovel.
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying on your porch?
A: Matt
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying on a beach?
A: Sandy
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs in a swimming pool?
A: Bob
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs in the middle of the ocean?
A: Fucked
Q: Whats worse than smoking pot with a baby?
A: Making a bong out of it.
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a felt tip marker?
A: you don't get second looks when you're writing with a felt tip marker!
Q: Why did the dead baby cross the road?
A: It was chained to a bumper.
Q: What do you have when you have 4 dead babies, take away two, and add 5 more?
A: An orgy!
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a table?
A: You can't fuck a table.
Q: How do you make a dead baby float?
A: Take your foot off of it's head.
Q: If a tree falls on a baby in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is it still hilarious?
Q: What is red and creeps up your leg?
A: A homesick abortion.
Q: What's red and lies in all four corners of the room?
A: A baby that's been playing with a chainsaw.
Q: What do vegetarian dingos eat?
A: Cabbage patch kids.
Q : Whats white and bobs up and down in a baby's crib ?
A : A Pedophiles ass.
Q: What's the difference between a watermelon and a dead baby?
A: A watermelon floats.
Q: Whats the safest way to play with a baby ?
A: With a condom.
Q: What gets louder as it gets smaller?
A: A baby in a trash compacter.
Q: What do you call a baby on a stick?
A: A Kebabie.
Q: What's the difference between a lamp and a dead baby?
A: It's really easy to turn on a lamp.
Q: Whats does a blind, deaf, quadriplegic baby can get for Christmas ?
A: Cancer.
Q: Why are test tube babies the most beautiful ones?
A: Because they're hand made.
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a trampoline?
A: When you jump on a trampoline, you take your boots off.
Q: What is the definition of revenge?
A: A baby with a dingo in its mouth.
Q: What's the difference between a baby and a bagel?
A: You can put a bagel in the toaster. You have to put the baby in the oven.
Q: What's the difference between a bucket of gravel and a bucket of baby guts?
A: You can't gargle gravel.
Q: Why did the toddler fall off his bike?
A1: A fridge fell on him .
A2: He was quadraplegic.
Q: Why do you unload a truck full of babies with a pitchfork?
A: So you can tell which ones are still alive.
Q: How do you know when you hit a live one?
A: The pitchfork shakes
Q: What's this? (hold arms out and shake them)
A: A live one.
Q: Why do you stick a baby in the blender feet first?
A: So you can see the expression on its face!
Q: What's blue and thrashes about on the floor?
A: A baby playing in a plastic bag.
Q: What is bright blue, pink, and sizzles?
A: A baby trying to breast feed from an electrical outlet.
Q: What's sicker than driving over a baby?
A: Skidding.
Q: How do you spoil a baby?
A: Leave it out in the sun.
Q: How do you stop a baby falling down a manhole?
A: Stick a javelin through it's head.
Q: How do you make a gay men pregnant?
A: stick a dead baby up his ass!
Q: Why did the toddler drop it's lollypop?
A: It was hit by a truck...
Q: What goes plop, plop, fizz, fizz?
A: Twins in an acid bath.
Q: What's red, screams and goes around in circles?
A: A baby with its foot nailed to the floor.
Q: What's the difference between a Cadillac and a pile of dead babies?
A: I don't have a Cadillac in my garage.
Q: How many babies does it take to paint a house?
A: Depends how hard you throw them
Q: Whats more fun than feeling up a dead baby
A: Feeling up a dead baby with three nipples
Q: What is the differance between a dead baby and a VHS tape?
A: The VHS tape don't stink when you leave it out in the sun
Q: How do you prepare a dead baby for Valentine's Day?
A: You shove a box of chocolates down his throat and a boquet of roses up his ass.
Q: Why did the Baby fall out of the Tree?
A: Because he was DEAD!
Q: What's grosser than gross?
A: A garbage can full of dead babies.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: The one at the bottom is still alive.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: He has to eat his way to freedom.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: He goes back for more.
Q: How do you get a baby to run faster?
A: Chase it with the lawn mower.
Q. What's the difference between a dead baby and an onion.
A. You don't cry when you chop up a dead baby.
Q: What has 4 legs and one arm?
A: A Doberman in a children's playground!
Q:What does a baby and a Pinto have in common?
A:They're fun to ride until they die.
Q: What happens when you burn baby's face off?
A: It makes weird noises and crawls into walls.
Q: what's funnier than a dead baby?
A: a dead baby sitting next to a kid with down syndrome.
Q: What do you get whan you dislocate a dead baby's jaw?
A: Deep Throat.
Q: What's blue and bloated and floating in your beer?
A: A dead baby with fetal alcohol syndrome!
Q: Whats white and red and hangs from a telephone wire?
A: A baby shot through a snowblower.
Q: How do you know when a baby is a dead baby?
A: The dog plays with it more.
Q: What does a bum call a dead baby in a dumpster?
A: A Freeloader.
Q: What do you get when you put a dead baby in a blender?
A: Hold on. I'll tell you in a second.
Q: What is better than a dead baby?
A: The revoked child-support.
Q: Whats the difference between a baby and a grandmother?
A: Grandmothers dont die when you fuck them in the ass
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a peanut butter cup?
A: The dead baby won't stick to the roof of your mouth.
Q: Why didn't they crucify baby jesus?
A: I dont know why they didn't either.
Q: What's the difference between a truck full of bowling balls and a truck full of dead babies?
A: You can't unload a truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork.
Q: What's the worst thing about fucking a dead baby?
A: Wiping the blood stains off of your clown suit!
Q: What's the best sound in the world?
A: Hearing dead baby's hips crack under pressure!
Q: what wiggles spits and is covered in shit?
A: inside out baby!
Q: What's blue and orange and lies at the bottom of a swimming pool?
A: A baby with burst armbands.
Q: How do you make a dead baby float?
A: Two scoops of ice cream, one scoop of dead baby.
Q: Whats worse than a having sex with a dead baby?
A: Having sex with a dead baby filled with razor blades.
Q: What's 18 inches long and makes women scream all night ?
A: Crib death.
Q: Why is there always hot water at childbirth?
A: In case of a stillbirth, soup.
Q: How do you stop a baby from choking?
A: Take your dick out of its mouth.
Q: What's red, bubbly, and scratches at the window before exploding?
A: A baby in a microwave.
Q: When is the best time to bury that baby you killed?
A: When it starts talking to you again.
Q: How many babies does it take to make a bottle of baby oil?
A: It depends on how hard you squeeze them.
Q: What's more fun than stapling babies to a wall?
A: Ripping them off again.
Q: What do you call a dead baby with its skin peeled off?
A: Sexy.
Q: What's funnier than a dead baby?
A: A dead baby in a clown costume!
Q: What's blue and flies around the room at high speeds?
A: A baby with a punctured lung.
Q: What do you call a dead baby pinned to your wall?
A: Art!
Q: How do you get 100 babies into a bucket?
A: With a blender!
Q: How do you get them out again?
A: With Doritos!!
Q: What is pink and red and sits in a corner?
A: A baby chewing on razor blades.
Q: What is green and sits in a corner?
A: The same baby, six weeks later.
Q: What is red and pink and can't turn round in a corridor?
A: A baby with a javelin through its throat.
Q: What is more disgusting than a pile of 100 dead babies?
A: One live one in the middle is eating its way out.
Q: What's blue and sits in the corner?
A: A baby in a baggie.
Q: What's present do you get for a dead baby?
A: A dead puppy.
Q: What's purple, covered in pus and squeals?
A: A peeled baby in a bag of salt.
Q: What sits in the kitchen and keeps getting smaller and smaller?
A: A baby combing it's hair with a potato peeler!
Q: What's pink and red and silver and crawls into walls?
A: A baby with forks in its eyes.
Q: Why did the baby cross the road?
A: It was stapled to the chicken.
Q: What do you get when you cut a baby with a straight razor?
A: An erection.
Q: Why did the baby fall off the swing?
A: Because it had no arms or legs.
Q: What's got four wheels, smokes and squeals?
A: A bus load of babies on fire.
Q: What's harder to do than nailing a baby to a tree?
A: Nailing it to a dead puppy.
Q: What's grosser than ten dead babies nailed to a tree?
A: One dead baby nailed to ten trees.
Q: What's pink and chunky?
A: A baby with leporacy.
Q: Why do babies have a soft spot in their heads?
A: So you can pick them up five at a time.
Q: How many dead babies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: As many as it takes to climb on top of them in order to reach the socket.
Q: What's pink and spits?
A: A baby in a frying pan.
Q: What's worse than finding a dead baby on your pillow in the morning?
A: Realizing you were drunk and made love to it the night before.
Q: What's more fun than a barrel of dead babies?
A: Sticking pins in their eyes.
Q: How do you make a baby cry twice?
A: Wipe your bloody cock on his teddy bear
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.
HAHAHAHAA fuckers! I am not ssooo wrong I can't recover! All your trolls are belong to... forget it...
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Oh well, it seems I have been doing it wrong the whole time!
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/thi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Oh well, it seems I have been doing it wrong the whole time!
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
The/. troll HOWTO
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated:)
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway:)
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though:)
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of/. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are/. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places/.ers could never have found on their own:)
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of/.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about/. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk/. responses.
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress:)
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll:)
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up:(
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical/. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get/.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution:)
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll:)
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that;-)
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here;-)
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy:)
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.ht ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by timothy on Saturday November 10, @10:31AM
from the tentative-steps dept.
Guppy06 writes: "According to this article at CNN, Congress has approved $30 million for the bastard stepchild that is the Pluto-Kuiper Express probe. Originally slated for a 2004 launch, it's now pushed back to 2006, the last possible date to launch while Jupiter is in the right place and Pluto's atmosphere is still an atomsphere. After being snubbed by NASA and then by the Bush administration (and in light of the recent budgeting complaints), it remains to be seen if NASA will actually go ahead with it."
< Covalent's Version of Apache 2.0 To Drop Monday | Flat-Rate Wireless Where The Sun Don't Shine (Much) >
Big_Ass_Spork (446856)[ Preferences ]
Related Links
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budgeting complaints
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Major Meteor Shower Next Weekend
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Pluto-Kuiper Express A Go (Again ... For Now ...)
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Pointing the Way for Micro Motion
Neutrinos, Muons and the Standard Model
Satellite Observing Black Holes
USNA "Budget" Satellite Launched and Functioning
NuTeV result disagrees with Standard Model
Pluto-Kuiper Express A Go (Again ... For Now ...) | Preferences | Top | 4 comments | Search Discussion Threshold: -1: 4 comments 0: 3 comments 1: 2 comments 2: 2 comments 3: 0 comments 4: 0 comments 5: 0 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) Save: The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Ass Penetration. (Score:-1, Troll)
by forkspoon on Saturday November 10, @11:27AM (#2548413)
(User #116573 Info) Hasn't this mission been on and off for years? It seems worthwhile, if only to get close-ups of Pluto.
Thanks,
Travis
forkspoon@hotmail.com
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
- Cool (Score:0, Offtopic)
Posted two days ago (Score:2, Informative)by p3d0 on Saturday November 10, @12:37PM (#2548539)
(User #42270 Info | http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~doylep) Interesting experiment: post a reasonable-souding article with a troll subject line, and see what the moderators do.
The only trouble is that your post is content-free, so this is an unmitigated troll. However, I don't feel like wasting my mod points on it.
Have a nice day.
--
Patrick Doyle [ Reply to This | Parent ]
by Man of E on Saturday November 10, @12:07PM (#2548465)
(User #531031 Info | http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 11, @01:22PM) Isn't this exactly the same story as this one [slashdot.org] posted two days ago? That story was both about this Pluto mission and the development of the Mars program, but a lot of the issues with Pluto have already been discussed.
[ Reply to This | Parent ] A Few Points (Score:2, Interesting)
by CheshireCatCO (weissj@nospam.colorado.edu) on Saturday November 10, @12:07PM (#2548466)
(User #185193 Info | http://bogart.colorado.edu/~weissj/cyrano.html) "Bastard stepchild..." The PKE was much too expensive. But, then, it was JPL's project, so no one was shocked at that. NASA was wise to have farmed it out for competing bids from other groups. And, in fact, the other groups are able to do at least as much (probably more) for less than JPL could. So calling it a 'bastard stepchild' seems unnecessarily derisive to me.
The 2006 launch date is not critical. One of the two competing team leaders has worked out that with Venus gravity assists, we could send a probe to Pluto in any given year. Furthermore, in reviewing the recent papers on the topic, he's determined that it is quite unlikely that the atmosphere will freeze out as was predicted a decade or two ago.
Link to IPC benchmarks (Score:1)
by markaa on Tuesday November 13, @08:33PM (#2561117)
(User #311298 Info) For the actual data, go here [ibm.com].
[ Reply to This | Parent ] tacosnot es aqui??? (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13, @08:36PM (#2561129) que es esto tacosnot???
donde esta sen~or cmdrtaco????
[ Reply to This | Parent ] I am as confused as heck (Score:1)
by not_cub on Tuesday November 13, @08:37PM (#2561133)
(User #133206 Info) 1. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
;) " says Timothy of slashdot, and I believe him. I will question every source. Goto 1.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]2. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
...to learn more about this intreging practice.
ÖÖÛáæííÛËÎ
Shut the fuck up, AC bitch !
Login and burn that karma!
What is "Taco-snotting?"
"Taco-snotting" is a term used by CmdrTaco to refer to the practice of sucking off a homosexual man and blowing the semen back out his nose onto his partner's face or body. Usually a long stream of semen is left on CmdrTaco's face, dribbling out of his nose, leading it to look like a large snot. Hence the term, "Taco-snotting."
Why am I getting emails from CmdrTaco asking me if I would enjoy a round of "Taco-snotting" with him?
You may have recently received an email similar to the following:You most likely accidentally forgot to uncheck the "Willing to Taco-snot" checkbox in your preferences. Whenever CmdrTaco gets bored, he roams through the database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy a Taco-snotting with him. And this time, he found you. To disable this setting, log in, go to your user page, click on You, and uncheck the box next to "Willing to Taco-snot." Of course, CmdrTaco's probably already got the hots for your semen, so it's probably too late.
Can I stop receiving emails from CmdrTaco?
Probably. If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, he might leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object to ward off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot you, he might chain you up in his basement and use you as his sex toy/slave for the rest of your life, or until he accidentally drowns you in cum while using you as his sex pony in a "circle-snot."
What is a "Circle-snot"?
A "circle-snot" is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk: When CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel, and Homos get together and Taco-snot each other's gooey, hot, sticky cum on each other's faces and bodies until they're covered with sticky, sweet man juice. Roblowme usually provides the extra lubricant; he owns a limo service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease. To complete the circle, Michael, Timothy, and Jamie sometimes join in, dressed in full Gestapo uniforms complete with Nazi regalia, and proceed to snot each other's cum and whip each other's asses with riding crops and cattleprods until their pasty, white geek bodies are exhausted from all the passionate, homosexual revelry.
Does Jon Katz get involved in this? I thought he was a paedophile, not a homosexual.
Actually, he's a homosexual paedophile. He's also a coprophiliac. Jon Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesn't involve himself in circle-snots. Mr. Katz usually engages in a game called "Katz juicy-douching" with his harem of little boys, which involves administering an enema to himself of little-boy urine, spooging the vile muck from his ass into a plastic bag, then slathering the goo all over his little boy's chained up and naked bodies.
Are you getting hard writing this?
Why, yes. Join me in a WIPO-snot?
No, thanks. I'm already Taco's boi toi.
$Id: tacosnotting.txt,v 1.2 2001/11/08 22:35:16 wipo Exp $
from the greatful-dead-fans-need-love-too dept.
After several years of reader requests, we finally cornered CowboyNeal long enough to do a Slashdot interview. Questions were posted last week. Today we brush aside the mask (or at least the hat) and get a glimpse of the real Jon Pater (aka CowboyNeal).
1) Karma?
by glowingspleen
Since you're probably the only one with real access to all the user records, you're the one to ask:
Who among us is the current Karma Whore King, and what is their score? Is there a maximum amount of karma one can earn?brAnd finally, is there a cutoff level where you auto-post at 3 or above?
CowboyNeal:
Wow, a question about karma, what I consider to be the most boring subject in all of Slashdot. I dunno who is the Karma Whore King, since we instituted a karma cap at 50, and all karma levels that are above 50 are living on borrowed time. Getting a karma above 20 allows one to post with a +1 bonus, and from there on there are no rewards.
I said that karma bores me, and I don't understand why people get all hung up over it. It's not like having a high karma is gonna get you discounts in stores. If you're really worried about karma, go donate money to charity or donate your time to some place that can use it. I guarantee the reward will be better than anything that Slashdot karma can get you.
2) Give us the ups and downs!
by Dino
What's the best thing that happened to you since Slashdot started? Conversly, what's the worst?
CowboyNeal:
Easily, the best part was when I got a real job out of it. I had done a few odds and ends for BSI and Slashdot before coming on full time, but getting a check on a regular basis is something I still am thankful for. The worst part is probably the sheer volume of email that I get to deal with on a daily basis. That's not to say that I dislike the people that email me, but it gets troublesome when one has an inbox that can take up to half a day daily to get squared away.
3) A User Info slashbox?
by update()
Like a lot of people, I bet, I frequently look at my user info page to see if there have been responses to my posts, and what moderations I have received. Would it be possible to provide a Slashbox with that information on the main page?
CowboyNeal:
This kind of thing could be implemented, but with our current setup it just wouldn't scale. It would need to add another query to viewing the home page, for each person that has it chosen. There might be a few tricks to implement this that could save some overhead, but if I were to make such a box, it definitely wouldn't happen until after Slashdot is running bender, the new development branch of Slashcode.
4) Slashdot
by emmons
How did you become tangled up in this Slashdot thing with that CmdrTaco guy? How did you guys meet?
CowboyNeal:
I met both Rob and Jeff when all of us where freshmen in college. Rob was in the same Health Dynamics (read, Phys. Ed.) class I was, and Jeff and I shared a lab bench in Chemistry Lab. The CS department at Hope wasn't that large, and most CS majors were aware of Chips & Dips, and would read it regularly. When I graduated, I was approached by Blockstackers, who owned Slashdot at the time, and offered a job. About two months later, Slashdot was acquired by Andover.Net (now OSDN) and my employment was transferred to them.
5) Yes!
by OlympicSponsor
I've been following CowboyNeal's career for years, reading everything he writes, watching all of his movies and eating all of his cooking. Now I finally have a chance to ask him the question that's been burning me up inside: What's Taco really like?
Seriously, can you give us a breakdown of how much time each editor spends actually reading the site they nominally run? Like, time spent clicking on user comments?
CowboyNeal:
Hrm, it sounds like you might have me confused with someone else. I've never made any movies or had a restaurant *grin*. Honestly, I don't know how much time an editor spends doing those tasks. I would assume it varies from person to person, but I don't share office space with hardly any of them, nor do any of them ever have to report to me.
I know from our internal discussion lists and channels, that all of us are constantly reading the site, but as for a detailed breakdown, I'd have no idea where to start.
6) The future
by yamla
What will you be doing in five years? In ten years? If you expect/hope to still be with Slashdot, what sort of changes do you see happening to Slashdot in that time?
And yes, I know 5 - 10 years is an eternity.
CowboyNeal:
5 - 10 years is an eternity! I don't even know what I'm doing two weeks from now!
I wish I knew. I was the kid in school who when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, didn't have the slightest clue. When I finally discovered computers, I knew that I wanted to work with computers in some capacity for a living. When I think about how much technology has advanced since I first started using a computer, it's truly amazing how far we've come. I'm hoping that someday we can put all this patent/copyright/intellectual property BS behind us, and by that time someone will have discovered the secret to putting infinite bandwidth into everyone's homes and with all of these new resources at our disposal, someone will discover the new killer app for all of it, repeat ad infinitum. That's how the system works. I just hope to be there and be a part of the process somehow. I think it's especially interesting how the internet and all of what it entails has made it easier for people to communicate and become exposed to experiences and views they normally wouldn't, so any new advances will hopefully only improve that.
I don't think Slashdot will do anything like try to take over all forms of media or any sort of grand scheme like that because there's already organizations into that sort of thing. I do think, however, that if a new way of delivering content that replaces or augments the web comes about, that we will most likely be there.
This is probably the best question I've been asked, because it was easily the toughest for me to answer. My job now is primarily the day-to-day maintenance of Slashdot, which means that I'm not usually concerned with looking to the future, but rather just making sure that our current system runs smoothly. In short, I'm not a leader but a follower.
7) What was your fav poll abuse?
by chabotc
What poll in which you were an 'option', did you find most amusing/entertaining?
What was the most depressing?
CowboyNeal:
The first few times I was a poll option I thought it was funny, but I have become rather immune to it now. Now it's to the point where I'm surprised when I am not an option. As for trying to pick out particular polls that amused or depressed me, I can't really remember any.
8) tell us the truth
by segmond
How often have you posted anonymously? do you have a pseudo handle? Have you ever trolled? Are you getting bored with slashdot? What is the biggest screw up that you did to the site that we never found out? Have you ever used "super moderating power" to mod down posts attacking slashdot editors...? What is your favorite pizza topping and sandwich?
CowboyNeal:
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
That should bring me up to the "screw up" question, so I will now relate a story that showcases my stupidity. One day I was working on Slashdot's database, and cleaning up a lot of old database entries, when I suddenly realized I'd forgotten a "WHERE" clause in one of the SQL statements.
Unfortunately, this was after the statement had already run, and the blocks table was completely wiped out. If you know anything about Slashcode, you know that blocks holds everything from color schemes, to the slashboxes, the HTML that gives the site its look and feel, to all the headlines that go into the slashboxes on the right side of the homepage. Of course, this brought the site to a halt until we could restore from backup. I was able to berate myself before anyone else could, though, so anyone in the know about my mistake was fairly forgiving.
As for "super moderating power", I know I could go into the database and moderate like crazy, but my ethics won't allow me to do so. Also, I don't usually read comments attached to stories. I have banned IP addresses from which people have been hammering on the site with scripts at the rate of several requests a second, but I don't actively moderate any stories.
I don't know if I have a favorite pizza topping. I used to work at a pizza place when I was in high school, and learned to like almost every pizza topping there is, even anchovies.
My favorite sandwich is easily a veggie submarine. I'm not a vegetarian, but I find myself ordering veggie subs more than any other sandwich.
9) Anime
by spudwiser
Seeing as in most Geeks in Space episodes Anime quotes and quips spew forth from you, I think we the listeners (and deranged readers) should see exactly how your background in anime developed.
CowboyNeal:
Well, this answer is pretty boring. One day in college my friend and I decided we should watch some anime, because we had heard it was cool. So we took a week, and rented a movie or two per night, starting with Ghost In The Shell, then moving on to Akira, Fist Of The North Star, and Vampire Hunter D. I think those are the anime titles everyone starts with, because they're available at almost any Blockbuster.
But yeah, we discovered we liked it, and I just started watching more anime. I warned that this answer was boring.
10) Stories
by Fervent
Why don't you yourself ever post any stories, Cowboy Neal?
CowboyNeal:
Oh, but I do. On the rare occasion that we get to record an episode of Geeks In Space I'll post the announcement in the radio section. Sometimes a story falls through the cracks and I'll pick it up, also, but that happens much less often lately. Rob and Jeff like to say that the surefire way to not get a story posted is to email it directly to them instead of using the submissions bin, but if you want to absolutely sure your story doesn't get posted to the site, email me it to me instead. *grin*
State of the
Taco Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday
August 16, @10:29AM
from the dept.
Why is
it that my personal value as a human being is always tied 100% to the status of
my server. Since last week the box has been cranky (a blown power supply,
resulted in the harddrive being happily moved to a machine with 128 megs less
RAM, which means the whole thing is just sluggish as hell today. And suddenly I
feel like shit. I feel tired unhealthy, and burnt out. A few weeks ago, I was on
top of the world: the machine was stable, kicking out 640,000 pages in one day,
and performing snappy for everyone. And I was cheerful. Its really strange that
a chunk of steel and silicon 3 time zones away defines my mood.
Why I do not like Trolls
I believe I have made it clear, through my
consistant down modding and IP banning of trolls, that I do not like trolls very
much. I believe that Trolls are the most offensive type of human that we have
ever seen. One can only assume that thier only purpose is to upset people, get
reactions from people, and to humiliate people.
Here recently, the
trolls have been focusing thier attacks more specifically the moderators and
editors of this web site. I must say, that I have read such horrible postings
from these trolls that, quite frankly, I am offended. I mean sure, there are a
lot of people here who do not like JonKatz for one reason or another (mine is
that he tends to post stories that are uninformed and ignorant, but that's
beside the point.), but that is no reason for us to flame him so much every time
he posts some stupid story. The fact is that myself, Hemos, JonKatz, cowboyNeal,
Neal, michael, timothy, Roblimo, Cliff, HeUnique, sengan, emmitt, justin++,
nate, and many others are all authors for this web site and you should start
showing us just a little respect. I mean, it may be fun to make up little songs
like the one posted here
[slashdot.org] But it still hurts our feelings to see this sort of stuff. Our
jobs are tough, and stuff like this just doesn't make it any easier. To think
that we all spend so much of our time maintaining this web site just for you
trolls to troll it up. Comments about me and JonKatz being homosexual partners
or me and Hemos. Now, I am not going to say that these things are false, but
there is no way that you guys actually know that about us, and it is none of
your business either. Yes, it is true that I, CmdrTaco, am a homosexual, and a
big one at that. Yes it is true that some times JonKats and I will be alone for
extended periods of time. Sometimes, as we work together, he will brush up
against me and I can't help but want to be alone with him. And don't get me
started on micheal. But that's not my point at all. Some of your trolls don't
even make sense. I mean, how many times can LinuxIsForAssholes post Can you
imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?? Or how do Trollaxor and Trolligula and
all the others keep coming up with these true stories about my homosexuality?
All you trolls use this link [goatse.cx] in many
of your trolls, why? Do you like that site? Did they get my good side? It is a
good picture of me, but again, that's not my point. And what about all those
damn trolls asking how we can be talking about things like the AOTC trailer in
the wake of Sept. 11. The fact is, Slashdot doesn't care. We don't care how many
people lost thier lives. All the innocent people. The only thing we even wonder
is if some of the people were checking out Slashdot at the time of the attack.
Oh, the other thing that sucks is that when the buildings went down we lost some
companies that had Linux installations. Does that make us bad people, maybe.
Does it make our bank accounts bigger through our constant advertising for
stupid worthless producs? Most definatly.
Now, you people who have a
different opinion than that which is expressed by the editors, prepare to be
modded down. We don't like people who do not agree with our ignorant opinions.
We want to silence you. You see, if you are silenced then the discussion is only
done by those who all agree. When someone with a mind of thier own disagrees and
comes on our website and see's that we all have the same opinion, then they will
believe that our opinion must be right. It's kinda like Hitler during WWII. If
you have a different opinion, you will be killed. You see enough people killed,
you change your opinion. We like to think of ourselves as Borg. We are but 1
collective, none of which has a mind of thier own. People are a lot safer that
way.
All in all, you can call use as many names as you want, but when it
comes down to it, we (the editor) as just as much Trolls as you are. We are
trolls with a different agenda. Our agenda is global mind control, and we want
to stop you from letting thses people know that original thoughts are natural.
We want them to think originality is a sign of weakness and stupidity.
You too? I have been smelling that alot lately ;)
I A FOREIGNER AM NOT!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds
of threads under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the
idea that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator division.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc. Writing with a
followup to the Slashdot post titled, "Who
Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared" Splinton had this to say: "In this
article, Ed
Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's critical sections.
Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are twice as fast again!"
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP
closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was
unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation.
This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and
they were part of the cut.
This article
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D enginesexplains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready
to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it
out.
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites having
been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another such project.
The HETE-2 satellite recently located a cosmic
gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot of help from friends) an
afterglow was detected, identifying its source. HETE-2 cost $26 million, only
1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.
A lot of
commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack,
but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by
using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts),
and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help
reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical
thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the
application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather
than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as
possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of
specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and
technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the
knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother
timothy on Tuesday
November 13, @07:59PM
from the cheapness-is-good dept.
Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds of threads
under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the idea
that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator
division.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc.
Writing with a followup to the Slashdot post titled,
"Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared"
Splinton had this to say: "In
this article, Ed Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's
critical sections. Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are
twice as fast again!"
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while
back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's
calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have
thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that
management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.
This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based
PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds
interesting? Go check it out.
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ...
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites
having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another
such project. The HETE-2
satellite recently
located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot
of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source.
HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a "small" scientific satellite
normally costs.
A lot of commercial "off the shelf" technology went into HETE. Nothing
from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard.
You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by
using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by
using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts
best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts
selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as
one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting
selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a
team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a
large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of
the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected
engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother?
dmarsh writes: "This
new
article from C|Net seems to be a
total contradiction to last week's
"Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the
important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual
survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at ;)
least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
<
Light Emitting Pictures On Standard Inkjet Printer
My fifth is a second? You trolls are slacking!
BBEEEAAATTTCCCHHH!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
I just went to Airline International. They tried to throw me out due to my many visible tatoos. After I showed them I emmense wad of moola, they heartilly invited me in. I asked if they had the above items because I want to grow up to be just like Montie Burns. The only item they had was a three pack of Grizzly Bear Underwear. I have them on right now, they're a mite itchy.
I am gonna see if Taco likes them later when I go over to give him his afternoon fucking.
SourceForge dying
/export/sf_tracker_export.php. Few people are aware of the later because it is undocumented. The export page explains how to use scripts that don't exist anymore; implementation of facilities to ease project extraction was stopped. The developer community is exclusively made of VA Linux employees and a few people who are asked not to disclose the current code.
Over the past few months the SourceForge development facility, which hosts a large number of Free Software projects, has changed its policies. Features for exporting a project from SourceForge have been removed. The implementation used to be exclusively Free Software but is now based on non-free software. Finally, VA Linux[1] has become rather underhand in their attempts to grasp exclusive control of contributors' work.
SourceForge did a lot of good for the Free Software community, but it's now time to break free.
Locking users in a non-free software world
SourceForge brought to Free Software a unified and standard development methodology based on modern tools. Before SourceForge, such tools (bug tracking, cvs, web, support, forums, polls, news, etc.) were available individually, but few developers used many of them together, because they had to set up the combined facilities on their own. SourceForge made the combination conveniently available for both new and experienced developers.
Because of the convenience of SourceForge, many Free Software developers have come to take this collection of features for granted, and would be reluctant to go back to the old way of doing things. Unfortunately, this means that when SourceForge itself takes a turn for the worse, it tends to pull Free Software developers down with it.
The second important thing SourceForge did was to provide this environment based exclusively on Free Software. By doing this, SourceForge not only provided a powerful methodology for the Free Software community, it also demonstrated what Free Software could do, and promoted the use of Free Software. And since the special software for SourceForge was itself free, anyone could set up a similar site. The SourceForge software became permanently available to developers everywhere. Developers in (say) India who can't afford the bandwidth to use the SourceForge site could have the benefit of the same features on their own server.
In August 2001, VA Linux reversed those policies and introduced non-free software on the SourceForge server. In announcing this (the original document was removed or moved shortly after the publication of this article), Larry Augustin (VA Linux CEO) claims that SourceForge.net users will "see virtually no changes". That may be true if they narrow their vision and consider only what job the site does and how to operate it. But when we consider the implications, things are very different now. Instead of a showcase for Free Software, SourceForge is now a demo site for non-free software. There is a danger that the many thousands of people registered on SourceForge will become increasingly hooked on the SourceForge site and on features implemented by proprietary software.
As a Free Software developer, you are still free to use the SourceForge server, but you won't have the freedom to copy, modify, study and distribute the software it runs; you won't be free to set up a similar site yourself, or adapt it to your own needs. The last published release of the SourceForge software is one year old.
The move to non-free software was the culmination of a series of steps designed to lock users in. There never was a way to fully extract projects from SourceForge, but efforts were made in this direction--then this year they were removed. At present the only things you can get are the CVS tree and tracker data
The mailing lists archives, a major service of SourceForge recently became unmaintained. Will it be replaced by a non-free software based solution ?
Contributors' work appropriation
Here is what happened to me shortly before the announcement that SourceForge would use and develop non-free software. Because I'm listed as a contributor (in the sources and documentation) to the SourceForge software, I received a request from VA Linux to assign copyright to them. I was not surprised or unhappy with this; many Free Software projects ask contributors to assign copyright of their changes to the main author. Assigning copyright to a single holder is a strategy for defending the GNU GPL more effectively, and I would have been happy to cooperate in that regard.
But when I read the details of their copyright assignment, I saw major problems. I was asked to assign copyright of my work that "is, or may in the future be, utilized in the SourceForge collaborative software development platform". The assignment was not limited to my contribution to the SourceForge code, it potentially covered all my past and future work if it was of some interest to SourceForge.
I was also expecting a promise that my work would be released under the GNU GPL, but the assignment said nothing about Free Software. VA Linux would be allowed to release the software I wrote under a non-free software license and not let the community have it at all. But I wasn't sure at the time if this was a real concern, because VA Linux only produced and used Free Software. Two weeks later they decided to introduce non-free software on SourceForge and that cast a different light on the question.
VA Linux told me that they only sent the assignment to two people, in the hope to refine it. We started a long discussion that lasted two months. I assumed this discussion was to make the copyright assignment more palatable to the Free Software community, so I worked hard to give constructive feedback. Finally I was sent the version of the copyright assignment produced by the legal department. I quote it here in its entirety:
SourceForge Copyright Assignment
Thank you for your interest in contributing software code to SourceForge.
In order for us to include the code in our product, we will need you to provide us with the rights to the code.
By signing this agreement, you, the undersigned, hereby assign to VA Linux all right, title and interest in and to the software code described below, and all copyright, patent, proprietary information, trade secret, and other intellectual property rights therein. You also agree to take all actions and sign all documents (such as copyright assignments or registrations) reasonably requested by VA Linux to evidence and record the above assignments.
This was even more of a power grab than the first draft. "You give us total control; we promise nothing". At this point, I knew that the attempts to clarify the copyright assignment were a waste of time; VA Linux clearly wasn't collecting copyright assignments in order to enforce the GNU GPL.
Escape entrapment
It's time for people who value freedom to escape from SourceForge. It has become a tar pit from which escape will become increasingly difficult. Development hosting platforms based completely on Free Software flourish all over the world. You can create your own, join an existing one or help write the underlying software. Some months ago I helped to launch Savannah for the GNU project because I felt the need of a collaboratively run platform. With friends and co-developpers we are now re-writing and packaging distributed development hosting software. The idea is to be able to install and operate a SourceForge-like site within hours. Savannah will run this software at the end of this year. At first it may have less functionality than SourceForge, but it has a bright future because it is rooted in a cooperative effort of people sharing Free Software.
SourceForge is free as in free beer because it was designed this way. It was a very expensive and ephemeral gift to the Free Software community. We could resent VA Linux for such a poisoned gift. On the contrary I think we should thank them. They brought us methodology, and taught us that a development hosting facility must be built in a distributed and collaborative way, not by a single company controlling everything from top to bottom. Of course that means everyone needs to spend a little time developing and maintaining these hosting facilities. We've finished our beer, it's time to win our freedom.
I am glad I was not alone in seeing the folley of the poster...
current UID's are up to fifty million plus
/. bandwagon and relearn the decimal numbering system...
Hey dipshit! The current UID's are only up to ~.5M, you are off by a factor of 100! Climb off that
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
HAHAHAHAA fuckers! I am not ssooo wrong I can't recover! All your trolls are belong to... forget it...
Q: What do you call a 30week-old premee?
A: An Appetizer!
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying in a ditch?
A: Phil
Q: What is special about a dead baby over all other forms of life
A: You can achieve deep throat from whichever way you enter
Q: How are babies and the elderly alike?
A: Both are fun to throw out of moving cars.
Q: What's red and dances
A: A baby on a barbecue
Q: Whats worse than finding 7 dead babies in 1 trash can?
A: Finding 1 dead baby in 7 trash cans.
Q: What's the difference between a Dead Baby and a tree?
A: One is legal to hit with an AX.
Q: What bounces up and down at 100mph?
A: A baby tied to the back of a truck.
Q: What's brown and gurgles?
A: A baby in a casserole.
Q: Whats the best thing about a siamese twin baby?
A: Threesomes.
Q: What do you get when you have sex with a pregnant woman?
A: A baby with a black eye!
Q: What's blue and flies around the room at high speeds?
A: A baby with a punctured lung.
Q: What's red and goes round and round?
A: A baby in a garbage disposal.
Q: What's the difference between a gay man and a freezer?
A: You can't hide dead babies in a gay man.
Q: What's more fun than strapping a baby to a washingline and then spinning it around at 200km/h?
A: Stopping it with a shovel.
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying on your porch?
A: Matt
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs laying on a beach?
A: Sandy
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs in a swimming pool?
A: Bob
Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs in the middle of the ocean?
A: Fucked
Q: Whats worse than smoking pot with a baby?
A: Making a bong out of it.
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a felt tip marker?
A: you don't get second looks when you're writing with a felt tip marker!
Q: Why did the dead baby cross the road?
A: It was chained to a bumper.
Q: What do you have when you have 4 dead babies, take away two, and add 5 more?
A: An orgy!
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a table?
A: You can't fuck a table.
Q: How do you make a dead baby float?
A: Take your foot off of it's head.
Q: If a tree falls on a baby in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is it still hilarious?
Q: What is red and creeps up your leg?
A: A homesick abortion.
Q: What's red and lies in all four corners of the room?
A: A baby that's been playing with a chainsaw.
Q: What do vegetarian dingos eat?
A: Cabbage patch kids.
Q : Whats white and bobs up and down in a baby's crib ?
A : A Pedophiles ass.
Q: What's the difference between a watermelon and a dead baby?
A: A watermelon floats.
Q: Whats the safest way to play with a baby ?
A: With a condom.
Q: What gets louder as it gets smaller?
A: A baby in a trash compacter.
Q: What do you call a baby on a stick?
A: A Kebabie.
Q: What's the difference between a lamp and a dead baby?
A: It's really easy to turn on a lamp.
Q: Whats does a blind, deaf, quadriplegic baby can get for Christmas ?
A: Cancer.
Q: Why are test tube babies the most beautiful ones?
A: Because they're hand made.
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a trampoline?
A: When you jump on a trampoline, you take your boots off.
Q: What is the definition of revenge?
A: A baby with a dingo in its mouth.
Q: What's the difference between a baby and a bagel?
A: You can put a bagel in the toaster. You have to put the baby in the oven.
Q: What's the difference between a bucket of gravel and a bucket of baby guts?
A: You can't gargle gravel.
Q: Why did the toddler fall off his bike?
A1: A fridge fell on him .
A2: He was quadraplegic.
Q: Why do you unload a truck full of babies with a pitchfork?
A: So you can tell which ones are still alive.
Q: How do you know when you hit a live one?
A: The pitchfork shakes
Q: What's this? (hold arms out and shake them)
A: A live one.
Q: Why do you stick a baby in the blender feet first?
A: So you can see the expression on its face!
Q: What's blue and thrashes about on the floor?
A: A baby playing in a plastic bag.
Q: What is bright blue, pink, and sizzles?
A: A baby trying to breast feed from an electrical outlet.
Q: What's sicker than driving over a baby?
A: Skidding.
Q: How do you spoil a baby?
A: Leave it out in the sun.
Q: How do you stop a baby falling down a manhole?
A: Stick a javelin through it's head.
Q: How do you make a gay men pregnant?
A: stick a dead baby up his ass!
Q: Why did the toddler drop it's lollypop?
A: It was hit by a truck...
Q: What goes plop, plop, fizz, fizz?
A: Twins in an acid bath.
Q: What's red, screams and goes around in circles?
A: A baby with its foot nailed to the floor.
Q: What's the difference between a Cadillac and a pile of dead babies?
A: I don't have a Cadillac in my garage.
Q: How many babies does it take to paint a house?
A: Depends how hard you throw them
Q: Whats more fun than feeling up a dead baby
A: Feeling up a dead baby with three nipples
Q: What is the differance between a dead baby and a VHS tape?
A: The VHS tape don't stink when you leave it out in the sun
Q: How do you prepare a dead baby for Valentine's Day?
A: You shove a box of chocolates down his throat and a boquet of roses up his ass.
Q: Why did the Baby fall out of the Tree?
A: Because he was DEAD!
Q: What's grosser than gross?
A: A garbage can full of dead babies.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: The one at the bottom is still alive.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: He has to eat his way to freedom.
Q: What's grosser than that?
A: He goes back for more.
Q: How do you get a baby to run faster?
A: Chase it with the lawn mower.
Q. What's the difference between a dead baby and an onion.
A. You don't cry when you chop up a dead baby.
Q: What has 4 legs and one arm?
A: A Doberman in a children's playground!
Q:What does a baby and a Pinto have in common?
A:They're fun to ride until they die.
Q: What happens when you burn baby's face off?
A: It makes weird noises and crawls into walls.
Q: what's funnier than a dead baby?
A: a dead baby sitting next to a kid with down syndrome.
Q: What do you get whan you dislocate a dead baby's jaw?
A: Deep Throat.
Q: What's blue and bloated and floating in your beer?
A: A dead baby with fetal alcohol syndrome!
Q: Whats white and red and hangs from a telephone wire?
A: A baby shot through a snowblower.
Q: How do you know when a baby is a dead baby?
A: The dog plays with it more.
Q: What does a bum call a dead baby in a dumpster?
A: A Freeloader.
Q: What do you get when you put a dead baby in a blender?
A: Hold on. I'll tell you in a second.
Q: What is better than a dead baby?
A: The revoked child-support.
Q: Whats the difference between a baby and a grandmother?
A: Grandmothers dont die when you fuck them in the ass
Q: What's the difference between a dead baby and a peanut butter cup?
A: The dead baby won't stick to the roof of your mouth.
Q: Why didn't they crucify baby jesus?
A: I dont know why they didn't either.
Q: What's the difference between a truck full of bowling balls and a truck full of dead babies?
A: You can't unload a truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork.
Q: What's the worst thing about fucking a dead baby?
A: Wiping the blood stains off of your clown suit!
Q: What's the best sound in the world?
A: Hearing dead baby's hips crack under pressure!
Q: what wiggles spits and is covered in shit?
A: inside out baby!
Q: What's blue and orange and lies at the bottom of a swimming pool?
A: A baby with burst armbands.
Q: How do you make a dead baby float?
A: Two scoops of ice cream, one scoop of dead baby.
Q: Whats worse than a having sex with a dead baby?
A: Having sex with a dead baby filled with razor blades.
Q: What's 18 inches long and makes women scream all night ?
A: Crib death.
Q: Why is there always hot water at childbirth?
A: In case of a stillbirth, soup.
Q: How do you stop a baby from choking?
A: Take your dick out of its mouth.
Q: What's red, bubbly, and scratches at the window before exploding?
A: A baby in a microwave.
Q: When is the best time to bury that baby you killed?
A: When it starts talking to you again.
Q: How many babies does it take to make a bottle of baby oil?
A: It depends on how hard you squeeze them.
Q: What's more fun than stapling babies to a wall?
A: Ripping them off again.
Q: What do you call a dead baby with its skin peeled off?
A: Sexy.
Q: What's funnier than a dead baby?
A: A dead baby in a clown costume!
Q: What's blue and flies around the room at high speeds?
A: A baby with a punctured lung.
Q: What do you call a dead baby pinned to your wall?
A: Art!
Q: How do you get 100 babies into a bucket?
A: With a blender!
Q: How do you get them out again?
A: With Doritos!!
Q: What is pink and red and sits in a corner?
A: A baby chewing on razor blades.
Q: What is green and sits in a corner?
A: The same baby, six weeks later.
Q: What is red and pink and can't turn round in a corridor?
A: A baby with a javelin through its throat.
Q: What is more disgusting than a pile of 100 dead babies?
A: One live one in the middle is eating its way out.
Q: What's blue and sits in the corner?
A: A baby in a baggie.
Q: What's present do you get for a dead baby?
A: A dead puppy.
Q: What's purple, covered in pus and squeals?
A: A peeled baby in a bag of salt.
Q: What sits in the kitchen and keeps getting smaller and smaller?
A: A baby combing it's hair with a potato peeler!
Q: What's pink and red and silver and crawls into walls?
A: A baby with forks in its eyes.
Q: Why did the baby cross the road?
A: It was stapled to the chicken.
Q: What do you get when you cut a baby with a straight razor?
A: An erection.
Q: Why did the baby fall off the swing?
A: Because it had no arms or legs.
Q: What's got four wheels, smokes and squeals?
A: A bus load of babies on fire.
Q: What's harder to do than nailing a baby to a tree?
A: Nailing it to a dead puppy.
Q: What's grosser than ten dead babies nailed to a tree?
A: One dead baby nailed to ten trees.
Q: What's pink and chunky?
A: A baby with leporacy.
Q: Why do babies have a soft spot in their heads?
A: So you can pick them up five at a time.
Q: How many dead babies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: As many as it takes to climb on top of them in order to reach the socket.
Q: What's pink and spits?
A: A baby in a frying pan.
Q: What's worse than finding a dead baby on your pillow in the morning?
A: Realizing you were drunk and made love to it the night before.
Q: What's more fun than a barrel of dead babies?
A: Sticking pins in their eyes.
Q: How do you make a baby cry twice?
A: Wipe your bloody cock on his teddy bear
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
HAHAHAHAA fuckers! I am not ssooo wrong I can't recover! All your trolls are belong to... forget it...
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
m(long i) ipinion b:
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
RiGhT: -- (note 31337 writing...)
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Oh well, it seems I have been doing it wrong the whole time!
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
wrong the whole time!!!
/. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
The
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results
The /. troll HOWTO
:)
/.ers. This section is dedicated to explaining how to use these in the course of your trolls. Remember though, a great troll can break any or all of these and still be successful...
/. typically repeats stories with small variations and runs lots of similar stories.
:)
/.ers are more likely to read your troll if it starts a large thread. You also want to remember that some people have set their comment thresholds to values higher than 0 - to get the attention of these you either want to get your post moderated up (see Style, below) or get a reply which gets moderated up to 4 or 5, in which case your troll becomes visible to all.
:)
/. and watch the karma roll in. And of course once you get the +1 bonus, the world is your oyster in terms of /. Posts made at a default of 2 hit even those people with the threshold of 2, are more likely to get moderated up even further if they are at all coherent, and people tend to lose their critical thinking abilities in the face of the +1 bonus. Milk it for all it's worth.
/. hero, like Linus Torveldes or Richard Strawlman (thanks dmg). Related to this is the use of the wrong word, explaining an acronym as being something it isn't or making a word into an acronym even when it isn't.
/. sense rather than the real-world sense). Start off fairly reasonable, making statements that are /. friendly and not being too controversial. As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. crowd. Moderators love it, and they rarely check the links, so be sure to include as many as possible. And make them wrong - a link to the Perl website should instead point to the Python website instead, and vice versa. The other alternative to incorrect links is "useful" links to places like www.linux.org and www.microsoft.com i.e. places /.ers could never have found on their own :)
/.ers for your amusement. But often a troll requires some help and so you should consider feeding it. Feeding is best reserved for people making either completely clueless responses, people making responses with holes in, or those wonderful people who write a 2000-word point-by-point rebuttal of your troll.
/. so that you can play on and against them. This is why anti-Linux, creationist, gun-loving, pro-corporation trolls work well - the vast majority of /.ers hold the opposite viewpoints. And if a few people agree with you, so much the better - it merely validates your viewpoint in the eyes of readers.
/.ers all kinds of things. Make broad generalisations about /. readers - call them "long-haired Linux zealots", "socialist open-source bigots" or whatever. Stereotyping is encouraged - people always want to think that they're an individual, and will point this out to you given half a chance.
/.ers of being elitist. This is an easy thing to do seeing as a lot of them are. Claim that is their grandmother couldn't use it, then they are just into it to feel better than Joe Sixpack rather than "doing it for the average user". This is always great for working into anti-Linux trolls - attack command-line tools and poorly designed desktops.
/.ers who will then make even more stupid replies, leaving them even more wide open for response.
/. responses.
/. has its community of regular trolls (hi guys!), it's only polite to publish your troll on one of the so-called "hidden" forums for all to see and admire. This way, you get to bask in the praise of other trolls, they get to contribute to your's if they want to, and you get an easy way to find the troll later on when you want to check on its progress :)
/.ers always post before thinking, and often it doesn't matter at all.
:)
:(
/. beliefs, but a similar effect can be achieved by taking a typical /. viewpoint and pushing it to ridiculous extremes.
/. posts, although some are more obvious targets than others. Civil liberty articles, especially on things like censorship, DMCA, UCITA that really get /.ers riled up, are usually extremely fruitful grounds for a well-crafted maniac. The other obvious type of article is anything which could possibly involve religion, especially evolution :)
/. posters and you would have to be very offensive to get this to work. Of course with religion trolls, the argument can go on for ever once it's started... The more common approach is the Christian fundamentalist. They are ignorant, intolerant and bigoted in the extreme. For them the Bible is the inerrant word of God revealed to man - it contains no flaws and no contradictions. Thus they are strict Creationists - mentions of evolution or cosmology will set them off on vitriolic rants. Flaming denunciations of anyone daring to contradict the "Word of God" are the way to go, and any kind of proof can always be ignored by appealing to "secular humanist brainwashing". And let's not forget, the USA is the greatest nation on Earth because it has the righteous power of Jesus Christ behind it.
:)
/.ers as a rule despise - the classic example is dumb marketing guy, but try consultants, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, executives, journalists (just think Jon Katz). With this kind of troll sweeping statements with little content are the norm, along wire dire portents of future catastrophe and dark hints of "insider knowledge".
/.ers would like it - saying "Linux requires the rock-solid guarantee of a trusted company like Microsoft" or "Apache cannot be trusted for mission-critical enterprise platforms" is guaranteed to get you denials explaining exactly why you're wrong, in excruciating detail.
/.ers protest "IANAL", they certainly seem to think they could be, and any mistakes you make will send them rushing to prove themselves by correcting you.
:) This category includes parodies, offtopic weirdness any all kinds of amusing stuff. Not really my area of expertise, this stuff is mainly done by gnarphlager and opensourceman. Thanks to gnarphlager for this section.
;-)
/. So feel free/obligated to litter your offtopic and random bits with puns. Hurt the bastards. And if they're sick enough to laugh at them, then they'll eventually end up here ;-)
:)
t ml - A List Of Fallacious Arguments - Learn them and use them liberally
t hi ngs.htm - Things Creationists hate
This is version 0.6 of a troll HOWTO, sort of a companion piece to jsm's excellent troll FAQ. As a draft, comments and criticism are always welcome, if not appreciated
Section 1 - Trolling techniques
There are techniques used by successful trolls to elicit the maximum amount of responses from unthinking
Timing
Because you're posting as an AC, your troll will generally be ignored in favour of posters using their accounts, and so getting in early is essential. A good guideline is to get into the first 20 posts, so that people reading the article will see the troll before it is swamped out. One way of increasing the speed with which you get your troll into play is to prepare them beforehand, and then quickly customise them for the current article. This is easier than it sounds since
Note that this is why Jon Katz stories are pretty worthless as trolling material - by the time you've found the article and prepared a troll there's already 50+ posts on it, most of them flaming Jon Katz anyway
Exposure
Once you've got your troll in, you need people to actually read it. You also want replies -
Accounts
An alternative to the time-honoured tradition of AC trolling is that of creating a "troll" account. This gives you the advantage of posting at 1 rather than 0, and slashbots are more likely to take you seriously, especially if you at least sound reasonable. If you do this, try to avoid posting stuff where it is obvious you're a troll under the account - post it anoymously instead - some slightly more canny readers actually check your user info before they reply. Not many though
The ultimate goal of the troll account is to secure the +1 bonus, which is currently received once you hit 26 points of Karma. To get there, employ the techniques of karma whoring that we see every day on
Layout
To get people reading it a troll needs to be easily readable. Make sure you break it down into easily digestible paragraphs, use HTML tags where appropriate (but always make sure you close them properly) and use whitespace appropriately.
Size
Generally a troll shouldn't be too short, otherwise it'll get lost in the crowd. A workable minimum is a couple of medium paragraphs. Conversely, it shouldn't be too long, or no-one will bother to read it. Keep it to a happy medium.
Spelling
Whilst spelling is important if you want the troll to be taken "seriously", key spelling mistakes can draw out the spelling zealots, especially if you mis-spell the name of a venerated
Subject
The subject line needs to draw attention to your post without making it obvious that it is a troll. A simple statement of the main point of your argument can work here.
Style
Once you realise that most moderators don't bother to read past the first paragraph or two, you can use this fact to craft trolls that can be moderated up as "Insightful" (note that I mean this in the
Linking
As we all know, a post with links is considered "informative" by the
Feeding
The ideal troll requires no feeding - it runs on its own, generating flamewars between clueless
Know your audience
Always keep in mind the kind of things advocated on
Arrogance
Be arrogant. You, as a troll, know that you're right. No other explanation could exist. The wronger the "fact", the more assertively you should state it. Make it clear that you are better than everyone else - you know the truth and they are just too stupid to realise it. Use plenty of sarcasm, and use "quotes" to show it to people too dumb to realise.
Offensiveness
Being offensive in your initial troll can be counter-productive - it causes moderators to mark you down as flamebait in general. But if you're feeding, then you can get away with calling
Indifference
Great for articles with a political or social bent, this kind of troll expresses complete indifference to the topic at hand, wondering who on Earth cares about it. An alternative method is to say that the topic only concerns a certain group of people - criminals, idiots, hackers (always use this instead of crackers) or whatever group you want to offend.
Sympathy
Appear to take the same stance as the people you're trying to troll - claim you're as much a fan of Linux as the next man, but... This way you can make all kinds of claims in the sure knowledge that you actually know what you're talking about. A great phrase to use here is "In my experience". Remember to act like all the things you're pointing out are unfortunate but true.
The common touch
Always accuse
The 31337 touch
The opposite of the above. Claim that technology or whatever is only for the elite of society and that any attempt to open it up for everyone is wrong, an attack on intellectualism and possibly even dangerous. If people were meant to understand these things then they would, and it's their fault if they're too stupid to learn.
Contradiction
Never be afraid to contradict yourself, even in the space of a single sentence. The phrases "I am a top programmer who codes in VB" or "I am a supporter of open source who uses NT at work and 95 at home" will be sure to get a response from some weenie smugly pointing out the contradiction. Confuse the issue more by engaging in contradiction when you are feeding - this will confuse
Clues
If you're feeling brave, give the reader clues that this is an obvious troll. The classic example here is dmg's stock phrase "I am often accused of trolling (whatever that is)", but also feel free to use phrases like "I have not read the article, and I don't know much about XYZ but I feel I must comment". If anyone responds to a troll with these kinds of clues in it, feel free to bask in the glow of knee-jerk
Denial
If you're unlucky someone will accuse you of being a troll (surely not!) and try and ruin it for you. If you don't want it all to end there, then be sure to counter it by accusing them of being small-minded and petty, saying that it's easier for them to say it's a troll than to accept that people have different opinions. Be sure to say this in the subject line, especially if their subject was the infamous "YHBT. YHL. HAND."
Claiming credit
Given that
As for when to post it, that's a matter of opinion really. You can either post it straight away or leave it will after people start biting. Remember that the troll forum is also frequented by non-trolls, and sometimes you may get a self-declared "troll-buster" try and expose you. But remember,
There is no real current forum at the moment thanks to various spammers hitting the sids, but try trolltalk, the original troll sid started by 80md and osm way back in the day. Generally all postings are done there as an AC, with your name at the end of the post. Include a link to the troll somewhere in the text, which ideally will be directly to the post and its replies - click on the #XX link in the thread to get there.
Ending the troll
Sometimes you just get bored with a troll, or people start posting genuinely thoughtful stuff in reply (it does happen). When this happens it might be time to own up to the troll with a helpful "YHBT. YHL. HAND." post. Sometimes people will carry on a discussion of the issue, and if you're really lucky (and it was a great troll) they will completely fail to believe you and carry on arguing. If that happens, pat yourself on the back for writing a great troll
The cheap $3 crack
Finally, when all else fails and your troll gets moderated down to (-1, Troll) within ten seconds of you posting it, the only honourable thing to do is to accuse the moderators of smoking the cheap $3 crack (again) and give up
Section 2 - Types of troll
The Maniac
Probably the most popular kind of troll, the Maniac holds an opinion on something, and won't budge from that opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. If challenged, the Maniac will simply get more and more agitated and abusive, deriding his opponents as "idiots", "wrong-thinking", "dangerous" and "subversive". Generally the Maniac takes a position that opposes the prevalent
Maniacs can be crafted for practically every article
Here are some fruitful avenues to explore:
The Right-Wing Maniac
Always popular, the right-wing maniac (RWM) is a God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving American, and proud of it. They don't care about the rest of the world, unless it's to "prove" that America is better than everything else, and they cannot stand liberal whining over civil rights. They hate the moral decay of America and want it to revert into a nation of heterosexual, Christian whites like it was meant to be. Woe betide anyone that dares to suggest otherwise.
Religion
There are two ways to approach this kind of maniac. The harder to pull off is the militant atheist, but this is quite common amongst
Ideology
Pick a philosophy, any philosophy. This troll is a troll with a cause - they have found some kind of ideological truth, and are out to expose every other philosophy as a sham. Whether it be libertarianism, objectivism, communism or capitalism, this troll will point out the obvious "flaws" in any other philosophies, whilst spouting dogma about their own. And the best thing is - you don't even need to know that much about what you're spouting - making doctrinaire mistakes will get both sides of the argument flaming you, adding to the fun.
Software
This is an old favourite and crops up in many forms, covering the gamut from OS maniacs (Linux zealots, MS-apologists or embittered BSD fanatics), language maniacs (Pascal vs. C, C vs. C++, C++ vs. Java, Perl vs. Python, VB vs. everything), application maniacs(GIMP vs. Photoshop, Netscape vs. IE, vi vs. emacs) and also includes people who complain about how technology should only be for the 31337 hackers.
Guns
Americans love their guns, and will always fight passionately for their Constitutionally guarenteed rights to bear arms and shoot people. Even the slightest hint of criticism of this will bring down the wrath of a thousand and one enraged gun-owners on you, so it's always a great point to work into a troll
The Expert
The Expert is someone who is "savvy" in their particular field, and is perfectly willing to give their opinion on any topic even vauguely related to their field. The Expert is most likely to be from a field which
Some possible angles to exploit:
Industry knowledge
The expert knows the computing industry from the inside - as a long-term pro, they can dispense knowledge knowing that they can "speak for the industry". Their smug self-satisfaction is bound to annoy, as is any suggestion that things aren't the way that
Helpful hints
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful "factual" information. In fact this probably works best with lawyer trolls - for all that
Offtopic Trolls
Not really a "troll" in the strict Jargon File sense of the word, but they certainly should be included here
Offtopic trolls, like any other, come in almost as many colours as an iMac, but generally not as cute. But then again, a good offtopic "troll" can affect more people than a repulsive little gumdrop on your desk, because you need to have someone SEE your desk before they can react. Simple? Moreso than even my overblown prose could indicate. Some basic examples:
The serial troll
Write a story. Keep expanding it. It doesn't matter what article you post it under, so long as it's high up. If you want people to recognize you, pick a couple themes or symbols, and carry them on throughout the story. Other alternatives include back linking or including the entire story, but adding more each time. Be funny if you want. Or if you don't feel like being funny, just be really weird. Someone will react.
The random troll
This has nothing to do with anything. Be it a stream of consciousness rant, or a description of the corner of your desk. Another favorite is a monologue, read as if spoken from any one given entity to another. The more outlandish, the better (a pair of socks talking to a mousepad, for example). If you really wanted to be artsy, work in an actual metaphor or legitimate meaning behind it, but it's not necessary.
The vaguely related troll
Start out with a comment about the article. Have a definite opinion of it. Then, after a little while, disintegrate into randomness. All roads eventually can eventually lead to cheese (yum), Natalie Portman, cannibalism, toasters, squirrels, futons, you name it. All it takes is a little bit of creativity. Oh, and feel free to use other trolls' motifs. Open source and all that
General tips:
If it's funny for a fleeting moment, then it's worth posting.
Puns. Puns are only less vile than mimes, but it's hard to mime on
Obscure cultural references and injokes are always good. SOMEONE will get them eventually.
Several drafts of a serial or random post are common, but true elegance is being able to come up with something on the spot that still makes the top 40 posts (on a post-heavy article)
Section 3 - Useful trolling links
The following links contain background information useful for trolls needing quick quotes and "expert" opinions to include.
General purpose links
ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html - How to deal with USENET trolls - learn your enemy
www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.h
www.altairiv.demon.co.uk/troll/trollfaq.html - USENET troll HOWTO
www.baiting.org - Baiting.org
www.fieldingtravel.com/df/index.htm - Fielding's DangerFinder - A guide to what and where's dangerous
Religious links
www.godhatesamerica.com/ - God Hates America
www.chalcedon.edu/creed.html - The Creed of Christian Reconstruction
www.demonbuster.com - How to cast out your demons and do spiritual warfare
riceinfo.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/
www.icr.org/ - Institute for Creation Research
www.xenu.net - Operation Clambake - The fight against Scientology on the net
www.hom.net/~angels/ - Citizens for the Ten Commandments
www.bju.edu/rcnbc.html - The difference between Catholics and Christians
www.geocities.com/prazske00/biblequotes.html - Bible quotes by category
Political/economy links
www.aynrand.org - The Ayn Rand Institute
www.reason.com - Libertarian site
www.freerepublic.com - Right-wing stuff
www.jbs.org - Excellent site for all kinds of right-wingery
www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html - Web economy bullshit generator
Crackpot science links
www.fixedearth.com - The Earth Is Not Moving
www.jir.com/index.htm - The Journal of Irreproducible Results