Sometimes we all need a simple reminder.

Internet Trolls The characterising feature of trolling is the perception of intent to disrupt a community in some way. Inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive or humorous content is posted, meant to draw other users into engaging the troll in a fruitless confrontation. The greater the reaction from the community the more likely the user is to troll again, as the person develops beliefs that certain actions achieve his/her goal to cause chaos. This gives rise to the often repeated protocol in Internet culture: "Do not feed the trolls." Often, a person will post a sincere message about which he is emotionally sensitive. Skillful trolls know that an easy way to upset him is to falsely claim that he is a "troll." In forums where most users are similar to each other, outsiders may be perceived as trolls simply because they do not fit into the social norms of that group. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a user who merely has different values, views, or ideas, and a user who is intentionally trolling. This can lead to genuinely hostile behavior, including flame wars. "Do not feed the trolls." The term troll is highly subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. The term is often used to discredit an opposing position, or its proponent, by argument . When appropriately applied to purposefully disruptive online behavior, the word troll economically converts an abstract code of online manners into a concrete image. Often, calling someone a troll makes assumptions about a writer's motives that may be incorrect. Regardless of the writer's motives, controversial posts are likely to attract a corrective or patronizing or outraged response by those who do not distinguish between real physical community (where people are actually exposed to some shared risk of bodily harm by their actions), and epistemic community (based on a mere exchange of words and ideas). Customs of discourse, or  etiquette, originating in physical communities are often applied naively to online discourse by newcomers who are not used to the range of views expressed online, often anonymously. Hence, both users and posts are commonly, and sometimes inaccurately, labelled as trolls when their content upsets people — ironically, the accusatory labeling of a troll may be more disruptive than the original alleged offense itself. Also, people may be more inclined to use epithets like troll in online public discussion than they would be in person, because online forums may seem more impersonal. There is a quote on IMDb which says that the common troll does not understand the words 'opinion' and 'leave', meaning that it feels it has superior opinions and will not quit until reaching its own trolling satisfaction. Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore him or her, because responding encourages a true troll to continue disruptive posts to that forum — hence the often-seen warning "Please do not feed the troll", for which PDNFTT is a common initialism. Posting this warning publicly, in reply to a troll's behavior to discourage further replies, may discourage the troll. However, it can also have the reverse effect, becoming itself food for the troll. Therefore, when a forum participant sees an apparently innocent answer to a troll as potential troll food, it may be more prudent to deliver the "Please do not feed the troll" warning in a private message to the answerer (e.g., by email, or PM). Examples: One-shot trolls One-shot troll messages are intended to be disruptive, and tend to be very obvious to ensure that they will receive annoyed replies. Disruptive trolls Off topic messages:  Those that are irrelevant to the focus of the forum. This can also be done in the middle of an existing thread to attempt to hijack the thread, or otherwise change the topic at hand. Off topic messages usually occur when a member has been completely disproved in a serious debate thus, causing that member to use his or her other multiple pseudonyms for the purposes of changing the subject matter. These disruptions may result in the degeneration of a well informed thread into a heated juvenile exchange consisting of insults and childish accusations between multiple parties. Attention-seeking trolls This class of trolls seeks to incite as many responses as possible and to absorb a disproportionate share of the collective attention span. Other examples Some trolls may denounce a particular religion in a religion newsgroup, though historically, this would have been called "flamebait". Like those who engage in flaming, self-proclaimed or alleged Internet trolls sometimes resort to innuendo or misdirection in the pursuit of their objective. It is possible to distinguish between comments that are flamebait and as a result of trolling: flames have the intent of being anti-social and offensive, while trolling comments are intended to provoke a reaction, though trolling comments may also be perceived as being anti-social, although that may not have been the intent of the author. A variant of the second variety (inflammatory messages) involves posting content obviously at odds with the (stated or unstated) focus of the group or forum; for example, posting cat-meat recipes on a pet lovers forum, posting evolutionary theory on a creationist forum (or vice versa), or posting messages about how all dragons are boring in the USENET group alt.fan.dragons. Other examples include fans of TV shows, movies, music artists or videogames going onto forums of rival shows/movies/artists/games and flaming them; for example, Halo vs. other first-person shooters in videogame forums, and flame wars between The Simpsons, South Park, and/or Family Guy forums, three popular and similar-themed adult cartoons that occasionally take pot shots at each other in real life. The "sock-puppet" troll enters a forum using several different identities. As provocative postings from one identity draw increasingly critical comment from other forum members, the troll enters the discussion under a second identity in support of the first. Alternatively, the troll may under the second identity criticise the first in order to develop credibility or esteem on the forum. (However, use of alternate IDs to identify a particular computer or the changing of a user ID after system crashes and other legitimate reasons for using more than one ID by the same person may not be intended as a deception.) Cross-posting is a popular method of Usenet trolls: a cross-posted article can be discussed simultaneously in several unrelated and/or opposing newsgroups; this is likely to result in a flame war. For instance, an anti-fast food flame bait might be cross-posted to healthy eating groups, environmentalist groups, animal rights groups, as well as a totally off-topic artificial intelligence newsgroup. An example of a successful troll is the well-known "Oh how I envy American students" USENET thread which had 3,000-odd follow-ups. A new USENET newsgroup, "alt.genius.bill-palmer", was created by Igor Chudov for the purpose of creating an outlet for discussing a controversial USENET personality, Bill Palmer, himself an alleged USENET troll who managed to make his personality the center of all discussions -- a characteristic that is common amongst attention-seeking trolls. A swirl of messages attempting to disprove his alleged status as genius, cross-posted to a wide variety of groups, made "a.g.b-p", the most popular new "alt.*" newsgroup of the year. Its creator was nominated for the "Troll of the Year 1996" award.

Although it is hard at times because we all feel a necessity to voice our personal opinions. The bottom line is "Do not feed the trolls."
Becasue we can all be quite passionate about our beliefs, our interests and our opinions, and I know I am just as guilty as the next person,  all we are doing is encouraging them to continue. So I believe we all need a reminder at times that we shouldn't fall in to those kind traps set out by trolls.
If your desire is to maintian some kind of order, organization and a family friendly atmosphere (On Topic) then "Do not feed the trolls."
Do not confront them in through any of the forums, email or private messaging. The only way to put a stop to them is to ignore them completely.
On another note; we must also keep in mind that there are going to be newcomers naive to the purpose of the particular forum and post a message that is off the intended nature of the topic. In that case there is no need to continue the discussion. A simple notification that the post is off topic is all that should be required.  It may be just a simple honest misstake or misunderstanding. On that chance or the chance that it may be a troll just "Don't feed into it any further"

 

Have A Nice ________ 

Thanks for the reality check, Tim. A little self examination followed after reading your post and I must apologize to Dark Neptune for my lack of consideration for a topic that was obviously dear to him.... Pluto being a planet. My comment wasn't meant maliciously but just to point out that "a dead horse was being beaten". In the future, I will keep my stupid jokes to myself (although some are actually funny, so I am told).

DarkStar2 wrote:

Thanks for the reality check, Tim. A little self examination followed after reading your post and I must apologize to Dark Neptune for my lack of consideration for a topic that was obviously dear to him.... Pluto being a planet. My comment wasn't meant maliciously but just to point out that "a dead horse was being beaten". In the future, I will keep my stupid jokes to myself (although some are actually funny, so I am told).

What you did does not compare to the behavior of a troll. So I see no need for you to make any apologies.

The reason I posted this was that we had a return troll posting some seriously libelous remarks, first about me, then he returned again the next day, after have been blocked under a one screen name, posting more libelous remarks about a numerous other members and Jeremy.  I posted this in the hopes people would read this and not reply to the troll before his posts could be deleted by the administration. 

The troll was astronomyboy who then returned with the screen name of Astronomyboys.  His behavior and style was that of a troll that was here last year under a few variations of the screen name astronomymoon. If you see these screen names anywhere else beware.  

Unfortunately, He will probably return again unless astronomy.com can have the IP blocked. Even then that is no guarantee to prevent the return of trolls.  Some of returning trolls are juvanile delinquent students using school computers and IP's.  So if the IP gets blocked I am sure the schools won't appreciate it, hopefully making efforts at finding the offending person a taking care of the problem from their end. 

 

Have A Nice __________