I found this and thought it was interestingly appropriate:

Please Don't Feed The Trolls
by Adam Reed



In Scandinavian folk tales, a troll is a scary thing that lives under a bridge, and dedicates its life to preventing the bridge from being used for the purpose for which it was built. In internet fora, a "troll" is a participant whose participation is counterproductive to the purpose of the forum she intrudes on. Trolls may be classified, first, by motivation: the psychopathological troll and the missionary troll.

2. The Psychopathological Troll

The psychopathological troll is motivated to participate in an internet forum by psychotic delusions or compulsions, or by a neurotic seeking of false self-esteem. The postings of a psychotic troll are unlikely to make any recognizable sense at all. On SOLO, the moderation of first posters effectively eliminates truly psychotic trolls. The neurotic troll either seeks to obtain false self-esteem by manipulating the reactions of others, or by demonstrating his "power" to destroy what others enjoy. The neurotic troll is often manipulative enough to make it past the initial moderation. However, on a Randian site such as SOLO, the neurotic troll's primacy of consciousness soon becomes evident: rather than respond substantively to the actual claims and arguments in the articles and posts he attacks, the neurotic troll twists and spins whatever he responds to, into whatever he has "the perfect answer" to. Then the original poster points out the manipulation and the neurotic troll is exposed. After two or three incidents of this type the neurotic troll usually gives up.

3. The Missionary Troll

The missionary troll is motivated to participate in an internet forum by a desire to win others to his favorite belief system, or at least to convince others that his belief system is worthy of consideration and respect. Thus, missionary troll's primary focus is on how his participation in the forum affects the consciousness of others—while in contrast the truly selfish participant's primary focus is to improve the correspondence to reality of his own knowledge. If an error of fact or logic is pointed out to a rational man, he will change his mind. If an error of fact or logic is pointed out to a missionary troll, the troll will either (1) ignore the correction, and proceed without regard to it, (2) misrepresent the correction and proceed regardless, (3) divert the argument in another direction to hide and ignore the substantive import of the error that was just identified. Indeed, the surest sign that one is dealing with a missionary troll is that he is totally evidence-proof and never changes his mind. The substantive litmus test of rationality versus trolldom is, when does one celebrate a success? I celebrate success when I bring my mind to a more accurate identification of reality. So, when comments in the discussion thread of my article on "The Ontology of Emergence" led me to reexamine Ayn Rand's view of the status of relations as existents, I changed my mind, edited a correction into the article, and celebrated the achievement of a more accurate identification of the relevant facts than the one I had before. A troll, on the other hand, considers himself successful only if he changes the mind of someone else. Perhaps the only thing that I have never seen on the internet, is a troll changing his own mind.

Missionary trolls are pervasive, persistent, and above all numerous. They are the vast majority of active trolls. The following sections of this article, which deal with the identification of trolls and trollcraft, are applicable primarily to the missionary troll.

4. Identification: The Apprentice Troll

The apprentice troll is one who has not yet achieved mastery of trollcraft, and lacks the habits of stealth that delay the identification of a master troll. Thus, the apprentice troll will often let her mask slip in the most inopportune way. For example, when a Randian disagrees with some detail of Objectivism, or with the prevailing opinions among Randians and Objectivists, he will be careful to present first the full rationale and context for his disagreement. An apprentice troll, on the other hand, will pretend interest in or even agreement with Objectivism, while stating—casually and without noticing—conclusions that flow from his true premises. Two examples:

(a): A missionary troll for Christianity believes that Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization, and therefore an intellectual threat to Christian belief is sabotage of the very foundations of that civilization. Therefore, she writes, "I have a feeling that the Inquisition was directly related to the same hostile forces which actually caused the Crusades ... Islam. If there were Islamic saboteurs hiding out in Spain (which there were), then under sufficient conditions of duress it seems understandable that they could have decided that drastic measures to ferret out those infiltrators were necessary ... so much of what we've been told about history was written by those who enviously hate western civilization and have seen fit to entrench their campaign of lies within history books." Celeste Norcross never bothered to learn that Ayn Rand regarded Western Civilization as based on the heritage of Classical Greece, and Christianity as an obstacle to its development. But then, an apprentice missionary "knows" that his position is the only one worth knowing, so why bother to learn anything else? Hence praise for The Inquisition.

(b): A missionary troll for libertarian nihilism believes that objectivity is impossible in ethics, and therefore to base moral judgement on an objective criterion—comparable to a chemist's "litmus test," an objective criterion for distinguishing acids from bases—is something to be condemned. Therefore, writes Robert Davison, "SOLO is worthwhile, because there are no litmus tests." Litmus tests bad. Objectivity bad. Subjectivist nihilism good. SOLO?



The only effective countermeasure is to refuse to be drawn into the troll's project. Please don't feed the trolls.

This is a n excerpt from http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Reed/Please_Dont_Feed_The_Trolls.shtml

The Internet Troll As The Trickster Archetype

Author and Source: http://www.drewspeak.com/

“The troll comes to the door of a new forum and sets down his bag of tricks. If he has a grudge against the people inside discussing and debating their passions with a certain degree of amicability, peacability and decorum, he does not show them. He has the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself. He loves chaos; his bag is full of golden apples he can lob to set the masses squabbling. He has also many masks, smoke bombs, straw men, cloaks, puppets, matches, ethanol, knives, dust, sand, and magicks of the most arcane sort. He knows what he is about - causing trouble. Why? This is the troll’s darkest mystery - if any one knew his secret, he would die. For all trolls, their motive power is this: without contraries, they cannot progress.”

I composed this in my notebook a while back; it seemed an exciting way to portray the rapidly-shifting identities and nuisance/amusement factors of these all-too familiar faces in all my old Usenet haunts. I do not deny that a certain nostalgia colours this imagery: the truth is, I was once an Internet troll, “back in the day” when I was an angry, atheist teenager on an AOL account. You know the type, I’m sure. Let me tell you: I trolled pretty hard. That’s all behind me, of course, and I don’t regret having outgrown the adrenaline rush of just rolling out and pissing off some Christian group, a WebTV board or a wrestling forum. It had its thrill at the time, but I eventually just figured out I would probably piss more people off writing my own blog than I would trolling anyone else’s. I offer no apologies for this. I imagine a sizable percentage of regular Internet posters have some small, guilty history of trolling - it’s been a common phase among a lot of the posters I’ve come in contact with over the years.

I do not necessarily wish to excessively extol the virtues and powers of the Internet troll; these persons are typically not quite so epic as they are a nuisance. They are readily the bane of many close-knit Internet communities, descending like a swarm of ethereal locusts from cursed heaven - a fantasy plague of boors eradicating established social orders with malice and confusion.

An article printed in the Washington Post entitled ominously “Female bloggers harassed, menaced” depicts the unfortunate story of Kathy Sierra, a blogger and software developer who had a horrifying ordeal with anonymous trolls: someone apparently posted images of her with a noose around her neck, someone made numerous threats and crafted images involving her being suffocated, her throat being slit, her being ejaculated on, etc., all presumably laden with a psychotically-creepy-murderous inflection. The woman eventually canceled a speaking arrangement at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference and went “underground” and blogged under a pseudonym, after announcing on her website: ““I have canceled all speaking engagements, I am afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.” Horrifying, sociopath behavior like this constitutes one of the potentialities of the troll: the individual who is truly vicious, twisted, obsessed and angry, an ugly, anonymous, dark-minded person with a hellbound will to do you pain. I imagine this image might stir some atavistic archetype: is this not the type of creature nightmares are made of? This, certainly, should be seen as an aspect of the devil.

Dear reader, I understand I’m relying heavily on phantasmal and fantastic imagery to examine this phenomenon: I believe it is crucial, then, when attempting to diagram the complex sociology of the Internet community, one recognize the mythical, virtual qualities of the medium. I hope that we can forgive this elevated language, or perhaps even accept it and play around with it, to see what ideas can emerge when viewing these “obvious” trends in Internet sociology through the painfully anachronistic context of old pagan gremlins.

The landscape which surrounds the Internet troll shimmers with the potentiality of violence, the unspoken simmering of anger and resentment towards the harasser as things get furiously heated. The shooter at the Case Western rampage, a 65-year old with confirmed “severe personality disorder” named Biswanath Halder was apparently motivated by this post from an anonymous troll to his website’s guestbook (http://web.archive.org/web/200312150535 ... halder.ws/) : “Bizzy Halder is a moron. This guy makes a living out of creeping people out. From his fake hair, to his fake teeth, his whitey tighty shorts and pants, to his ---- stained sweaters this guy is a LOON. He’s been kicked out of every lab on campus and everyone makes fun of him. So let’s not even talk about credibility. Don’t listen to a word this guy says.” Shortly afterwards, he opened fire on Case Western with an automatic weapon, apparently attempting to target the troll, a co-worker he suspected of having hacked his website in the past. Neither the man he killed nor the others wounded were the troll. The delusional Indian man had been, quite literally, swinging at spirits, or in this case, shooting at spirits.

Internet trolls can have real power. They can alter your emotional landscape, insert their presence very tangibly into your life. Being trolled can be a harrowing experience. Because of the implicit anonymity built into Internet dialogue, the user often has no clear idea who is harassing him/her - they are confronted only by an adversary who might be represented only by an alphanumeric “name” and a barrage of abuse. There is often little recourse against the offending party. Back in the day when I trolled Usenet, many persons tried to report me as violating my ISP’s Terms of Service to no avail. I received not one single piece of mail from my Internet provider asking me to stop being such a pain in the ---, despite the fact that I was very obviously flooding newsgroups with flames and nonsense, enough to render legitimate conversation impossible. In the instances where physical threats and the like are leveled, there is a venue for law enforcement to get involved, and rightfully so, but rarely are trolls ever quite that vicious. Most of the time, flames will fall within the bounds of protected, free speech: one can no more muzzle a blatant troll than he can any other dissenting view.

A classic rule of thumb has ever been: do not feed the trolls, and many a new user has been regaled with this adage in the face of an inflammatory poster; the problem is, few persons are willing to heed this familiar warning. One might note similarities in this attitude to that of Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon; when confronted with the premise of ideological terrorism, it is the typical human response to fight fire with fire, trade blow for blow. In mediums of the ideological, textual, and memetic, however, fighting back against malicious phantasms is unproductive. When one is literally “swinging at spirits”, these spirits gain power and substance they hitherto do not possess. It is through opposition and response that they gain validity, become “real” enough to cause the stir and scenes they aim to make.

Moderation features are often nearly useless against these guys: erasing a post makes a troll only more determined to write the same sort of message again, and banning a troll practically guarantees he will darken your doorstep again with a vengeance. I read an account of a Slashdot troll once who claimed to have scripts constantly fishing for proxy servers and free e-mail accounts so that he could consistently hold hundreds of accounts simultaneously in order to vote himself to whatever position he pleased via the meta-moderation system; while I cannot guarantee the veracity of this man’s account, it nonetheless demonstrates the level of effort a troll is willing to exert into making his point. And while I would imagine that each individual troll has his own agenda, this all begs the question - what, exactly, is the point of trolling?

Chaos, discord, controversy, argument; the troll often serves as the Erisian element, capable of galvanizing and polarizing unsuspecting groups with his tricks. What’s the point? Maybe it’s fun to push the limits, to agitate people, to vent one’s hostile emotions at unsuspecting, real persons under the mask of anonymity. Maybe it’s an outlet for real cruelty and vehemence, maybe it’s a hobby, anything could be driving the motivated troll. There are troublemakers in all sorts of settings, in all sorts of mythologies - a troll can be equated to Loki or Anansi just as easily as they could a vitriolic bigot. Who knows? All I understand is that the Internet troll exists by the grace of those who give him a voice; without that, he is nothing.

this site is pretty good in general:

http://trollpolice.com/trolls-and-cyberstalkers/

Trolls and Cyberstalkers

For now, until I can compile a good write up of my own, I have listed here for you the resources I suggest follow up on. These resources and new sites will be maintained and added even after I publish my own write-up.

Trolls
What is a troll? An Internet troll is an person who constructs an online identity and use it on message boards and discussion groups for specific abuse purposes. Note that when trolls operate in teams they are more difficult to recognize. What do we mean by teams? Usually, if a person has caused havoc on an online community, and have been banned, they will have friends join in. Usually this is more for a personal agenda.

What motivates trolling? There are many motives but the most common is attention. It’s been my experience that most troll’s objectives are to gain the attention of the community or particular members. They will create fake personas or change their persona to better fit the interests of their targets.

How do I recognize a troll? It is never easy to tell them apart from genuine posters especially when they do not disclose their goal immediately. We have seen cases where trolls took several months to build support in the community before starting their trolling activity in the open. Contrary to what most people may imagine, their contribution to the community may be positive and supportive at first.

* Spamming troll: Posts to many newsgroups with the same verbatim post.
* Kooks: A regular member of a forum who habitually drops comments that have no basis on the topic or even in reality.
* Flamer: Does not contribute to the group except by making inflammatory comments.
* Hit-and-runner: Stops in, make one or two posts and move on.
* Psycho trolls: Has a psychological need to feel good by making others feel bad.

How to deal with them? Trolls are best to be ignored.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS. This is our best recommendation. Use the Ignore button at the top right of the posts and avoid the topics that look artificially controversial. Do not reply to these bait posts and do not communicate any personal information. In support communities, the troll will often pose as a victim. They will seek your support and trust.

Even if your reaction sheds light on the troll or exposes them in some fashion, these type of people will thrive off any attention you give them. Trolls have no impact on a community if people do not respond to them.

You should not publicly post about troll suspicions, PM the webmaster if you feel that there is a case for a potential troll. Usually, and experience webmaster is already onto the troll. A troll will thrive on your attention and those who will follow you. Whether the attention is positive or negative it serves the troll’s purpose. The best course of action is to shun the trolls and not address them or talk about them at all.

From the same site:

Tactics to Expect

I am going to focus most on what a cyber-stalker will do and how they likely will react. For the most part, a cyber-stalker is no different than someone stalking you in person. Usually their motive is personal. Whether they’ve grown an infatuation or obsession through meeting you online or in person (sometimes both), they are usually following and harassing you for a personal agenda.

Usually they are fixated on a delusional idea of you, resentful of your rejection, infatuated or jealous/bitter. From experience, their first approach is by creating a new identity and becoming apart of the community where you are a member. They will often post in areas that you have interest in and create a fake persona of the type of person you might be attracted to. Eventually, they will contact you, through PM, IM or email.

I personally have made the mistake in trying to rationalize with a cyber-stalker and help them overcome their issue. DO NOT, and let me repeat, DO NOT assume you can befriend a person of this mentality and solve the problem so that everyone can “just all get along.” It WILL NOT work. The best thing you can do is tell them to leave you alone and get it out there that this person is harassing you. Keep every shred of evidence you have. Although on a cosmetic level it might appear they can supply “evidence” to prove otherwise, I promise you what you can show by keeping emails, PMs and other logs is refutable.