Posted By peter gotch Hi All Why are you ganging up on Martin? Our resident troll must be loving it, especially since there has been a history of some readers not realising that the troll is spoofing. The responses to its postings make us look either dumb or with too much time on our hands. Edited guidance from the internet……. Trolls are people who come onto forums and post things to create a disturbance within the online community. What motivates a troll? Some motivations are: • Attention seeking. These types of trolls love to take over a chat with anger and profanity. They love when the other chatters or forum members feed into their games. Trolls will also break the terms of usage just to see if any action will be taken or just how far they can push the rules. • Amusement is another motive. • Boredom is another. For example, a bored teenager may begin talking about gross or sexually explicit things just to get a reaction from older chatters. • Wasting time is also something trolls do, and they do it with little effort. Trolls love the domino effect. They will post a small offensive post, and the members of the chat community will grab it and run with it until the whole room is out of control. Meanwhile the troll is sitting behind the screen laughing his butt off, watching the community make fools of themselves. Dealing with Trolls Some things you can do are: • Ignore them. Imagine the frustration the troll will feel when no one pays any attention to anything it says! • Step back and allow the moderator to handle the situation.. Chatters may think that action is not being taken because they don't see it happening in open chat, but what a chatter does not realise is a lot of interactions that take place between hosts and trolls take place behind the scenes in private chats • On the forums, never reply to a troll's message, unless it is to say "I'm reporting this post." (If you've reported it and say so, a dozen others won't also think they need to report it.) When the online community collectively ignore the trolls, usually they will get bored and leave Regards, Peter

Posted By Chris Pope I'm not sure why my renegade local branch has invited a humour specialist to give ideas on how to improve communication at next years one day seminar. My guess is that it will be the biggest attraction.