Refusing to be played for a fool anymore doesn't make me a "troll hunter." I'm not hunting anything, I'm just stating the obvious.
When you've been the victim of relentless trollish behavior for the past six months you tend to get a sense for what it is that drives them. Creating a moniker pretending to be his own wife is exactly the thing we should expect from a dedicated troll. He's already lied about being a roofer, and I don't believe he's actually married. Mike is in need of constant support from other people which is why he scoured through the board's history to find like minded "Conservatives" and then lured people like Markk back here to provide him with backup. It is also the point of him creating other personas to support himself.
Now you can believe whatever you want, but our refusal to doesn't make us "just like him."
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal" - Ajax18
I was amused by what I quoted, and I am naturally suspicious, given who she's claiming her husband is. And that's without mentioning the numerous sock puppets we've experienced lately. Should we just forget all that?
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.
Praise to the man who communed with Maverick!
Jersey Girl anointed that Prophet and Seer.
Blessed to open the last Perfume Album,
Cranks shall excoriate him, and so let's have a beer.
Praise to his memory, he lived as a moderator;
Honored and blest be his ever great name!
Long shall his blood, tested for poppy seeds,
Drives on I-15 while the earth revolves again.
Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of the forums;
Two must atone for the blood of that man.
Wake up the world for the conflict of justice.
Millions shall know “Brother Shades” once again.
by the way, RI, you're point about meeting new people to the board with suspicion is well taken. We should give every new poster the benefit of the doubt.
I'd love to believe that's AM's wife. I would welcome her here, if I thought she... existed.
I generally do take new people at their word. This is a special case, though, I think you could admit.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.
by the way, RI, you're point about meeting new people to the board with suspicion is well taken. We should give every new poster the benefit of the doubt.
I'd love to believe that's AM's wife. I would welcome her here, if I thought she... existed.
I generally do take new people at their word. This is a special case, though, I think you could admit.
And if it truly is her, she should be aware of her "husbands" history here and naturally understand why anyone here would be suspicious.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal" - Ajax18
Thank you. I should clarify my point. Some here have put in considerable effort reading and understanding the current academic research on trolling that is published in various legitimate venues. They have attempted to distill that information into a helpful definition of trolling in a way that allows for workable strategies, and have shared their distillations with others. Caring about the communities under attack is a significant reason to engage in such effort.
Would you call such people “troll hunters”? I would. Are they no better than trolls? Not a chance. I don’t think you had this type of troll hunter in mind with your statement, but it still was a painful shock to read, which is why I agreed to disagree.
Thank you. I should clarify my point. Some here have put in considerable effort reading and understanding the current academic research on trolling that is published in various legitimate venues. They have attempted to distill that information into a helpful definition of trolling in a way that allows for workable strategies, and have shared their distillations with others. Caring about the communities under attack is a significant reason to engage in such effort.
Would you call such people “troll hunters”? I would. Are they no better than trolls? Not a chance. I don’t think you had this type of troll hunter in mind with your statement, but it still was a painful shock to read, which is why I agreed to disagree.
No, I would not call such people Troll Hunters. I’ve found that in online forums, there is commonly a group of people who rush to find any reason to label a new participant as a Troll. It’s like a competition. And, although they commonly consider themselves as talented at spotting trolls, it’s just cognitive bias. For every correct guess, there are numerous incorrect ones.
That’s troll hunting. Reading up on the literature to understand the trolling behavior and using that information to handle destructive trolling is an entirely different thing. As you’ve stated, identifying trolling often depends on a pattern of behavior. We don’t have any pattern for the new account or enough information to conclude that it is part of a Mike’s pattern.
he/him When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.
Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
Few here probably remember this, but back in the early 2000's ZLMB was the forum most frequented by Mormon dissidents. There was a ton of overlap with the FAIR Boards in terms of sharing the same group of participants. More and more people were fleeing FAIR (mostly critics) because of the totalitarian nature of their moderating habits. Juliann was considered someone who was pissed off because someone dropped a house on her sister. I posted back then as Aselahx on ZLMB and used my real name at FAIR. The debates over religion, science and politics were epic at ZLMB. High profile participants like Brent Metcalfe, David Bokovoy and Dan Peterson were regular posters on both forums and debates between them drove most of the traffic. A significant amount of time at ZMLB involved whining about how the mods at FAIR were too heavy handed, just arbitrarily banning or suspending or censoring any posts they felt threatened the testimony of the TBMs. So that was a pet peeve for many people who found refuge at ZLMB, even though those mods would also ban people for blatant rule breaking.
I don't remember Dr. Shades ever participating on either forum, aside from the time I called him out over his claim that the Church just arbitrarily added a million members to its rolls. He had posted an article on his website about this and I wrote a response refuting it, which led to him showing up and addressing my critique. Shades became more of a known figure during that time thanks to John Tvetdness writing a critique of his website in a FARMS Review.
So at some point, for whatever reason, the owner of ZLMB decided to drop the forum. This was around 2005-2006 when I just moved to Brazil, so I didn't really have a lot of time to keep up with the details about how that all happened. Prior to my move I was posting daily, probably averaging 10 posts per day over the course of a year. That's how intense those debates were getting. Much of it was over KEP, but also the War in Iraq. But once ZLMB went down it left a lot of us in limbo because some of us were forbidden to post at FAIR and others didn't want to anymore. During that time I was a devout apologist, and I was already operating an apologetic website called Mormon Think Tank, so I added a message board to the database around the same time Dr. Shades started his board and so people were participating on both of our forums for several months. This was when Dan Peterson and I were trading blows on a daily basis, and so he was on my board with Bill Hamblin driving a lot of the traffic. It was also during the initial stages of my "apostasy" which became a big deal in the world of Mormon Apologetics, because I was always known as a loyal member of FAIR wand I had written some of their material. So within the first month there were over two hundred new members on MTT, many of whom were already regular ZLMB posters who used different monikers. Beastie, Ray A, Tarski, etc. I remember one of my favorite posters was "Thunderchops" and his moniker was a photo of him and his huge side-burns. I'm not sure if he ever showed up on this forum or not. Anyway, I thought it was cool that both Shades and I were running separate boards to give people more flexibility.
My board's PhP software was far superior though because I was actually paying for it, and it offered a slew of features. For example, it allowed each member to modify the graphic design of the board to their preferences, and when they blocked someone, they were BLOCKED for good. There was no seeing any of their comments when someone else quoted them. The search engine was also far superior. None of this +- crap in the search feature, or claiming a word is "too common" to search. You could also open a private chat window with individual members and chat live with them and even hear them speak. I remember doing this with Bond James Bond, and a few others. I was paying top dollar for my website and so the services that were included were also top of the line. Shades' board at some point would later add some features like giving each member webspace for a blog, but at some point something happened, and those features were dropped and the search engine function became famously useless as EA would say. I assumed I would eventually hire moderators for MTT, but I ran the board by myself for the 4-5 months it was online, and I don't recall ever needing to censor anyone because the ignore feature actually worked as intended. Very much like blocking someone on Facebook, you don't see ANYTHING they post and they can't see what you post, hence there is nothing to see to complain about.
So, anyway. To the point. One day Shades had an emotional fit over my board getting more traffic. I can't remember if it was something he expressed publicly or maybe just privately to me, but I remember hearing him made me feel bad because running a message board seemed to really, really mean a lot to him. For me, it was just a side hobby and I was able to attend to it on a daily basis because I worked from home. But for him it was something much bigger, and I sensed his pain when he saw that more people were preferring the features and the aesthetics of my forum. This was around the same time my wife just gave birth to our second child so I figured, what the hell, maybe I'm spending too much time with this thing anyway. I'll just shut the board down and instruct all participants to head on over to Mormon Discussions. And the rest is history. I had no idea that he wasn't even paying for the board or that some other mystery person had total power over it.
So, in hindsight, I wish I had never done that. Because unbeknownst to all of us, Shades never had the time, the desire nor the financial means to keep up with this board. So much history has been lost as a result.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal" - Ajax18
Thank you. I should clarify my point. Some here have put in considerable effort reading and understanding the current academic research on trolling that is published in various legitimate venues. They have attempted to distill that information into a helpful definition of trolling in a way that allows for workable strategies, and have shared their distillations with others. Caring about the communities under attack is a significant reason to engage in such effort.
Would you call such people “troll hunters”? I would. Are they no better than trolls? Not a chance. I don’t think you had this type of troll hunter in mind with your statement, but it still was a painful shock to read, which is why I agreed to disagree.
No, I would not call such people Troll Hunters.
Thank you for the clarification.
I’ve found that in online forums, there is commonly a group of people who rush to find any reason to label a new participant as a Troll.
agreed, and frequently using an inaccurate definition of trolling.
That’s troll hunting. Reading up on the literature to understand the trolling behavior and using that information to handle destructive trolling is an entirely different thing. As you’ve stated, identifying trolling often depends on a pattern of behavior.
Excellent point. That is a key issue, in my opinion. Moderators typically are unpaid and overworked, doing the best they can, post by post. Evaluating a pattern is a different skill, and very time-consuming. Post by post moderation doesn’t work when trolls are present.
Refusing to be played for a fool anymore doesn't make me a "troll hunter." I'm not hunting anything, I'm just stating the obvious.
When you've been the victim of relentless trollish behavior for the past six months you tend to get a sense for what it is that drives them. Creating a moniker pretending to be his own wife is exactly the thing we should expect from a dedicated troll. He's already lied about being a roofer, and I don't believe he's actually married. Mike is in need of constant support from other people which is why he scoured through the board's history to find like minded "Conservatives" and then lured people like Markk back here to provide him with backup. It is also the point of him creating other personas to support himself.
Now you can believe whatever you want, but our refusal to doesn't make us "just like him."
Why did you put quote marks around something that actually isn’t a quote of anything I said? In my opinion, Troll Hunting, which I clarified to Marcus, is just as bad as trolling because both are toxic in online communities. In your hurry to show how smart you are by being the first to spot the troll, You called an ostensible new person a liar and a fraud. Based on nothing other than your own bias.
You’re free to believe whatever you want. That has nothing to do with what you choose to post.
he/him When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.
Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
