David wrote:
From Capitol Hill Blue

The Rant
Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
By DOUG THOMPSON
Dec 9, 2005, 07:53



Definition of a troll:

In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory
messages on the internet, such as on online discussion forums, to
disrupt discussion or to upset its participants. "Troll" can also mean
the inflammatory message itself posted by a troll or be a verb meaning
to post such messages. "Trolling" (the gerund) is also commonly used to
describe the activity.

Disruptive trolls
Off topic messages: Those that are irrelevant to the focus of the
forum.
Page widening: Filling up fields with large pictures or characters to
make previous posts unreadable.
Offensive media: Annoying sound files or disturbing pictures in a
message, or linking to shock sites that contain such media. Often these
links are disguised as legitimate links.
Inflammatory messages, including racist comments.
Deliberately revealing the ending of a recent popular movie or book.
Bumping an old discussion, or rehashing a highly controversial past
topic, particularly in smaller online communities.
Deliberate and repeated misspelling of other people's nicks in order to
disturb or irritate them in a conversation.
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Attention-seeking trolls
This class of trolls seeks to obtain as many responses as possible and
to absorb a disproportionate amount of the collective attention span.

Advertising another forum, especially a rival or a hated forum.
Messages containing an obvious flaw or error: "I think 2001: A Space
Odyssey is Roman Polanski's best movie."
Asking for help with an implausable task or problem "How do I season my
Crock Pot? I don't want everything cooked in it to taste the same."
Intentionally naive questions: "Can I use olive oil instead of water,
when cooking pasta?"
Messages containing a self referential appeals to status. "Evian is
bottled water for white trash. I prefer Dasani water imported from
Italy."
Intentionally posting an outrageous argument, deliberately constructed
around a fundamental but obfuscated flaw or error. Often the poster
will become defensive when the argument is refuted, but may instead
continue the thread through the use of further flawed arguments; this
is referred to as "feeding" the troll.
A subclass of the above is the flawed proof of an important unsolved
mathematical problem or impossibility (e.g. 1 = 2); however, these may
not always be troll-posts, and are sometimes, at least, mathematically
interesting.
Politically contentious messages: "I think George W. Bush is the
best/worst President ever."
Posting politically sensitive images in inappropriate places.
Pretending to be innocent, after a flamewar ensues.
Off-topic complaints about personal life, or threats of suicide:
sometimes, this is the "cry for help" troll.
Plural or paranoid answers to personal opinions expressed by
individuals: "I don't believe that all of you really believe that, you
are teaming against me."
Paramour trolls get a thrill from establishing serial online affairs
with females of a group. This incites public rivalry among the women
who once thought the nicknames, poetry, love statements were exclusive
to them. Since the online love affair is developed separately in chat
programs, it takes a long time for the online cat-fight to be detected.

Any combination of the above: For example, a troll will combine
inflammatory statements with poor grammar and AIM-speak (which is also
known as "netspeak" or "chatspeak"). "lmfao u are so weak minded and
predictablei thought i wan iggied i play ya like a card"
[edit]
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 innuendoes or misdirections in the pursuit of their
objectives.

A variant of the second variety (inflammatory messages) involves
posting content obviously severely contradictory to 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.

The "sock puppet" troll often enters a forum using several different
identities. As postings from one identity attract increasingly critical
comment from other forum members, the troll enters the forum using a
second identity in support of the first. The troll may even use
postings from the second identity to criticise those from the first in
order to develop credibility on the forum.

Cross-posting is a popular method of choice by 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 swirl
of messages attempting to disprove his alleged status as genius,
cross-posted to hell and back, 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.