Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Blog for Arizona has had a rash of Trolls of late (you all know who they are):
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
As my dear departed grandfather used to say, "opinions are like assholes, everyone has one." The converse is also true.
The writers of this blog have differing views on how to handle trolls. I can only speak to my view.
Trolls are primarily interested in hijacking a web site through its comment page. A good example of this are the online comments at newspaper web sites. Trolls pollute newspaper web sites to such an extent that the online comments have been rendered useless – the comments are largely an online message board for trolls to communicate with one another and celebrate their "trolldom." I no longer read the comments at newspaper web sites because of this phenomenon. I will not allow this to happen here at Blog for Arizona.
We have an exceptionally intelligent and articulate readership who engage in serious and thoughtful discussion (most of the time). The goal of the troll is to disrupt this in one of two ways: they want to engage readers in tit-for-tat combat because they see themselves as some kind of self-anointed warrior for a particular cause or point of view, or they want to discourage others from commenting through intimidation and fear of being attacked by the troll.
Trolls have no respect for individuals or property (intellectual). It is all about them. So please, do not feed the trolls (DFTT). Once I have identified a troll I will remove their comments ASAP. When a troll does not get any responses to their troll postings, they will eventually go away.