Sat in bed this morning enjoying my breakfast of Minky Whale Sperm Soup while watching the latest cable news about the position of the Japanese whaling fleet, my partner rolled over and stopped biting the pillow and asked me why I haven't written about Trolling on my blog. I thought about this for a few minutes - while watching the latest whale getting speared by our noble Japanese fishermen – then finished slurping my soup.
Remembering that whaling is a purely scientific venture, I tickled – oops, silly me! - I mean ticked the box on my official scientific whale tester diary and decided that Minky whale sperm soup is definitely “salty” – then thought some more about my blog. I gave my partner Nigel a sloppy kiss and turned my mind back to how I first started my trolling.
To begin with I started by picking a subject. ‘Stonehenge’ came up in the local UK news about a road scheme which the government were planning, so I searched Google for Stonehenge and soon found a few forums on which people talking about standing stones.
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Megalith' means 'Big Stone', so I chose a provocative name to start my trolling, 'LittleStone', and quickly signed up to 3 websites: the Stonesmailing list, The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic Portal. I created a few sock puppet characters, Chyknel and Chyknel2, and of course my own name ‘Paul Wills’ (who I never post under but which allows me to lurk if I get banned) and set to work.
First thing with trolling is to watch who posts the most and make friends with them. Posts with comments like 'Fantastic research' and 'Well done!' soon earn innocent unsuspecting friends, especially the silly females on the forum. If they can paint pretty pictures, so much the better to lure them in by praising their crappy works.
A good tip is to find a piece of news on one site and immediately post it on the other two websites. This then comes across that I am the original finder of the news and makes it appear as if I am on the ball with current news. The same with new people’s websites. By posting a link it appears that I am something to do with the hard work of the website owners, without having to get out of bed for a whale fin cracker! Good aren’t I?
The next trolling thing to do is to find someone who posts on two or three of the forums and pick on them. I usually make an outrageous comment about their work and wait for the reply. I then ignore the meat of their reply and pick up on a simple thing like a spelling mistake or a grammatical error. This annoys the original poster who will post back with a knee jerk reaction telling me I missed the point. I then ignore the gripe and continue nitpicking with minor details, while smirking to myself about how good I actually am compared to these other silly people. This soon leads to an insult being thrown at me - at which point I immediately complain to the Administrator of the website than I am being victimised. And because this is a public forum, the naïve Admin comes down on my side and makes me look good and the victim feeling so pissed off that they usually leave. This leaves the path open to me to continue trolling.
You need a skin as tough as Blue Whales to continue, but knowing that Blue Whale skin can be boiled into a nice tasty broth I continue to wear people down and slowly work my way through the top posters on each forum.
By now a lot of people will be complaining to the admin so a bit of brown-nosing is in order. By writing to the Administrators and confidently letting them know that I am terminally ill always wins a lot of sympathy. Meanwhile, no one on the forums know that the admins think I am ill, so this leaves my path wide open.
The Next step is to be nice to people who I have actually pissed off. This makes lurkers on the forum think I am actually nice, but misunderstood, and they usually pipe-in with small comments. This is the chance to pick on a timid person. I usually tear into them with a long convoluted reply to a simple question they ask. Most questions asked by these ‘newbies’ can be found elsewhere on the forum by simply searching, but the newbies don't know this. This also makes me look even more intelligent.
By this point, seasoned posters will start asking me hard questions. I ignore most of these and answer with comments like "my parents just died", which brings in lots more sympathy, especially from people whose parents really have died. Instant friends! By now over half of the original posters will have actually left the forum forever without saying anything publicly. New people now look on me as 'the expert' on the forum, which allows me to puff up my ego and to start reporting my findings. I take this info from people who have been driven away and by reposting their old findings in my own words. Sometimes the original posters will chime in complaining, but the nit-picking spelling trick usually makes them go away again.
Next is to start a blog - and poetry is always a good earner! Ask people for poems on megaliths and they soon start to roll in. Adding peoples contributions to my blog makes me look great and they feel as if they have added something. Of course, I never give credit to the hard work of others, as I want to claim the glory for myself. Peppering the blog with photos from Google-images is a morning’s work and brightens up the site no end. And that’s just about it for the time being.
After a hard days trolling, I usually settle down to a nice grilled whale-steak in dolphin sauce and a hardcore Geisha porn video that employs a lot of coke bottles! Lovely.
