There is a breathtaking case of trolling currently underway on the official SL forums which has held me jaw-droppingly enthralled to the point of my mug of tea going cold as I read it this morning. It’s almost applaudable as a classic of its type.

It began, as epic trolling usually does, with another poster asking a question that could and should provoke an interesting discussion among the forum members. But, after a few pages, the troll discovers the thread and sets to work. The thread then devolves into three pages of interesting posts, fifty pages of argument and counter-argument. Or, in other words: “three pages about all of you and fifty pages all about ME!”

Of course, the main aims of a forum troll are to keep the thread off-track, and to keep the focus on their own entertainment. Some trolls have their fun and then drop away, some find a good thread that they can take down for page after page of never-ending ‘fun’, and some trolls actually aren’t trolls at all: they really are that obtuse/dense/rude/nasty in real life. Some trolls are blatant and obvious, and some are stealth trolls, going undercover for weeks or months to pose as a ‘normal’ member of the forums and getting people on their side before they begin to take potshots at the one or two people they have decided to target.

The victory of a troll comes when yet another person is so incensed or upset at what they’re saying that they simply have to join the debate. When you click that ‘reply’ button, the troll has won. When you log into a forum you usually only ever read and never post on, the troll has won. When you create a new account just to post your response, the troll has won. It doesn’t matter if your comment is sincere or witty, a reasoned response or a scathing put-down; the fact is that you responded at all. The troll has won. In a sense, even my blogpost here is a small victory for the troll, because their behaviour has prompted me to make it. However, since I’ve been online for quite a number of years and seen trolling of all kinds in many an online environment, this post is more of a generic one about the phenomenon, rather than a specific response. I don’t count this post as a win for the troll.

I have, in the past, responded. Many of us have, to some degree. I don’t really ‘do’ forums much. I tend to read rather than respond. But, on occasion, I’ve been provoked enough to log in or click ‘reply’. Looking back on that now, I know that it was a futile thing to do. I played right into the troll’s game, as did everyone else who responded. The troll had a nasty, biting response to me, clearly intended to draw me further in and provoke me into the infinity loop of their game. Their response was what made me look at the screen and say to myself, “Nope, I fell for it once but I see through it now. You’re not going to beat me a second time”.

Buddha was well known for his ability to respond to evil with good.  There was a man who knew about his reputation and he traveled miles and miles and miles to test Buddha. When he arrived and stood before Buddha, he verbally abused him constantly, he insulted him, he challenged him, he did everything he could to offend Buddha.

Buddha was unmoved, he simply turned to the man and said, “May I ask you a question?”

The man responded with “Well, what?”

Buddha said, “If someone offers you a gift and you decline to accept it to whom then does it belong?”

The man said, “Then it belongs to the person who offered it”

Buddha smiled, “That is correct.  So if I decline to accept your abuse does it not then still belong to you?”

The man was speechless and walked away.

So how do you win? Simple: you don’t respond. It’s painfully obvious when you see it in black and white, but the troll knows that at some point he will say something that will get you so wound up that you simply have to reply. The moment when you can recognise him for what he’s trying to do, when you can step back and say, “Ahaha, I don’t think so, sunshine,” and when you resist that urge to respond… that’s when you have won and the troll has lost.

It takes a lot of strength to do that. Really, it does. But the satisfaction you’ll get in realising you’ve beaten the troll is far greater for its rarity than their satisfaction is in goading yet another person to join the fray.

ETA: Comments to this post are now disabled, as it was attracting a lot of spam comments.