Troll School- presented by wizer

Troll Tip of the Day- Part 3/4, the various troll Classifications...continued.

Strategic Trolls

Strategic trolls often operate in groups, rather than alone. They use multiple personalities, each of which uses the techniques outlined in the section on tactical trolls. However, they have an overall strategy for drawing innocent members into flame wars, ultimately causing them to leave, or meltdown, or for the trolls to dominate the group.

* They have various phases to their strategy, where each phase aims to achieve different things.
* The first phase usually involves establishing multiple personalities who become recognised as integral members of the group - "friendly trolls". Don't be deceived by the title - they appear to be friendly but they have very different hidden motives. Establishing friendly trolls in a group is a process that can take many months or even years.
* The second phase involves using new personalities to start divisive threads, in the manner outlined under "Tactical Trolls". In the event that no list members respond to these threads, other phase two trolls will respond to them to keep the debate active.
* If existing members have not yet joined in the arguments, the third phase involves "offensive trolls" attacking their own personae from the first phase. As these trolls will have built up a lot of goodwill in the group, other list members will jump to their defence, and they are therefore drawn in to the argument.
* In case other list members don't join in, "defensive trolls" may join in and continue to give air time to the "offensive trolls". The friendly trolls can also incite innocent members to join in using personal messages or even offsite emails.
* Another phase may involve the friendly trolls starting to retaliate publicly, calling on the support of bona fide forum members.
* When things start to get out of hand, threads will be escalated to stoke the flames and stir things up as much as possible and cause the maximum amount of strife and chaos.

The following is an excerpt, written by an experienced strategic troll, that gives a nice take home message for today's lesson:

"Anyone can walk into alt.sex and post that pornography should be banned. Anyone can walk into rec.sport.baseball and say "baseball sucks". It takes unbelievable skill and discipline to cause a PROLONGED flame war. That is what we do. But it can only be done with talent, and numbers to match that talent. We only bring into the fold people who have the knack to use smarts to incite chaos, not stupidity to incite being ignored when people see a post and know what you're up to."

I will once again recall the thread I posted on Enotalone a few weeks back, about how I "cheated" on my significant other during a basement bachelor party, and then these strange sores started appearing on my genitals. That thread grew to over 5 pages and over a 100 posts in a few short hours. It would have probably continued at that rate as I stoked the flames..i was going to add the part about how all the guys were called to submit to paternity tests because one of the strippers was pregnant. Unfortunately they are watching for me over there and banned the user ID before I could get to the next phase.

I intend to start the same thread over at Loveshack.org, and it will be even better with some of the troll students on board. If you are interested, please register a user ID at loveshack.org and stay tuned for a trolling date.