Don't Feed the Troll

[Bayes]

A troll in Internetspeak refers to an entity which involves itself in discussions purely for the purpose of disturbing other users and making itself feel important. Because trolls take away from productive work, the standard response is to starve the troll of attention by ignoring it and going about your usual business.

A troll usually has little or no interest in contributing to the development of the site in question and is interested in :

   
• Deliberately angering people.
• Breaking the normal flow of debate/discussion.
• Disrupting the smooth operation of the site.
• Deliberately being annoying for the sake of being obnoxious. For instance, using abusive names to refer to all the members on the site.
• Making itself the main topic of interest or discussion.

It is probable that, for the troll, the last point is the most important.  To this end it will post deliberately inflammatory messages which generate inflammatory responses; complain about being the victim of the inflammatory responses; endeavor to obtain allies against the discrimination it feels; turn on those same allies, etc. etc.  The whole objective of the exercise is to disrupt or make someone do something you wanted them to do for laughs.
If a poster begins to post comments along the lines of, “Can’t you see how stupid you all are?” or “I keep laughing at all of you,” there is high probability that the poster is a troll. Because the troll feeds on having its name mentioned or by generating debate or ill feeling, many internet users either ignore the troll completely or respond with the phrase, “Don’t Feed the Troll".

Trolls take away from productive work.  The only ethical way to avoid this is to stop feeding the troll and go about your usual work.

[Juiced91]

Wonder who you referring to

[Bayes]

No-one in particular, just a general post so members can recognize Trolls and know the best way to deal with them.