Lovely guide to Trolls

Found this on another site and loved it - thought I'd share.

Identify your Troll.

1 Trolls post things guaranteed to wind you up. This is a dog training forum, so posting something about training dogs by kicking them, for example, would hint towards trollish behaviour.

2 Trolls like to be offensive, this is also to wind you up. Racist, sexist, ageist - any of the offensive, hate type behaviour will do.

3 Trolls generally lie - like the fantasy creatures they are named after, they make up things to get you going.

Understand the Troll.

Trolls are bored, and have nothing else to do but hide behind a computer and start fights. They WANT you to get angry with them, they want you to quote their posts and spread the evil further.
Trolls can be any age and any level of intellect, do not be fooled into thinking trolls are always stupid, or are always kids.
Trolls cannot be reasoned with, and you will never win an argument with a troll either, so dont try!

What to do with the Troll

Well, trolls are to an extent, immortal - they will always exist in cyberspace. There is no magical Troll Spray that gets rid of them, you cannot kill the trolls.

You can get rid of individual trolls from a forum, and we can only do this by starving them.

Do not feed the trolls. Instead, ignore their behaviour and posts, and PM either a moderator or admin (thats myself, or BoardHost).

Quote the offensive material to us, via pm, and also the URL to the thread itself and we will deal with it.

Do not reply directly to the troll by quoting their post, as when we come to delete the offensive stuff we have to delete your posts as well (or the thread makes no sense to subsequent readers).

Please also be aware that although myself and BoardHost (and Victoria) do look at the boards daily, there may be a delay before we can remove something, though since I am based in the uk and BoardHost and Victoria are based in the US, between us the board is covered fairly constantly.

If there is a short delay, please resist the temptation to respond to trolls - we know its really hard but it is necessary!

When we do identify a troll, we make a note of their IP, and we ban them. If they return with a new IP, they get banned again.

We can ban people over and over and over again, its very quick and easy and takes us very little effort to do - far less effort than a troll will expend in rejoining over and over, or posting again and again.