There was a good flood of troll threads today, 90% of which came from just 2 IP addresses (just banned). Fairfax General should look a bit more socially acceptable as all of the junk has been moved to Off-Topic.
If anyone is interested the troll posts have been marked so that one can discern which troll made which posts. The posts of the first banned troll are linked here:
http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/read/40/472097.html and marked with [user banned] in the subject line. The second troll's posts have all been edited with: "Openband" troll, moving to Off-Topic
Just in case anyone is keeping score.
No bother Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There's literally a handful of posters with
> mostly-content-free posts. The rest of us out here
> read, reply, and contribute in a normal manner. My
> pet theory about The Jerks is they simply haven't
> got enough Internet interaction under their belts
> and don't yet realize the humor ran out a long
> time ago - the joke is them, not what they post.
>
> But that's just my pet theory - you can read or
> even simply not read the handful of posters that
> post such dreck - it's easy, even if the posters
> use multiple IDs.
I agree completely but unfortunately the number of people who are just coming in contact with the REAL internet (peer to peer communication, not just corporate sales portals) continues to increase almost exponentially and doesn't seem like it will plateau anytime soon. There is an incredible myriad of garbage posted here but a brief glance at user-generated comments on Youtube or Yahoo's message boards clearly shows this is a full-internet phenomenon of "less educated than the previous generation of internet users" coming online. As their contact with new people and philosophies shapes their thoughts over time I'm sure we'll have a much more informed and rational internet (and society), but it worries me greatly that the shrinking percentage of old school internet superheroes will throw up their hands and stop correcting the throngs of trolls and children.
I would LOVE to implement a reddit or Slashdot-style karma based moderation system where the apparent worth of each post could be made abundantly clear to the poster by the community at large, but that functionality hasn't been implemented cleanly enough in any OSS message board software that I care to use (without transitioning to Slashcode or Reddit's code base entirely, any PHP developers want to lend a week?)
And I'll move this topic to Off-Topic in a few days as well.
- Cary (the admin)