Questions tagged [trolling]
For questions about internet trolls and trolling on Stack Exchange sites.
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How should we flag obvious troll questions? [duplicate]
From time to time, I encounter questions that are obviously trolling (i.e., not a real question) but not spam and not using abusive language and I often wonder what the best course of action is when ...
7
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1
answer
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Should I flag again when the system automatically handles the rude/abusive flag?
After receiving very useful advice in a previous Meta Q&A, a certain troll has seen their posts becoming very short-lived. With the help of other community members, we close, flag, and delete the ...
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3
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Does the SE network have an effective process in place to deal with aggressively toxic users?
I welcome any details that can be shared, but I understand if there are specifics that cannot be. I am primarily interested in whether the process exists, rather than what that process is.
What's been ...
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Can I show that I'll not retaliate upon negative feedback? Am I being trolled/harassed?
Within the last year or two (* see correction), when I post a question on the various Stack Exchange sites, it usually gets a downvote within about two minutes. At first I thought I was somehow ...
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Can I use spam and RA flags interchangeably? [duplicate]
If I flag trolling as spam, or flag spam as rude or abusive, will that be a big deal? Sometimes I come across a malicious post but at first glance I can't tell whether it's spam or trolling. In that ...
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Are troll armies really a threat? [duplicate]
I am worried that some people just want to misuse the site, just like a lot of other sites. It is possible that some people might be interested in making people lose massive amounts of reputation for ...
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25
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3
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What action should I take if my notification queue gets flooded with derogatory comments from a specific user?
I am noticing my notification queue getting flooded with comments on my questions and answers containing derogatory remarks from a specific user account.
I am flagging the comments as I see them, ...
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Is this a troll or a bot answering? [duplicate]
This really caught my attention. As you can below this photo, there's user (Maybe a person or maybe bot) answered the question but it is not answer the question.
So is this person just a pure troll ...
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121
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Neopronouns or trolling?
It’s the 112 rep question: Am I looking at someone’s legitimate pronouns or trolling?
(It’s unfortunate I have to ask, but this is just where we are right now.)
I’ve seen “my pronouns are [insert ...
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How can we handle users derailing debates in comments?
Sometimes, here on SE sites, I have seen a behavior that I consider abusive. I'm sure that many other users here also saw that. I will use an anecdote to present it:
Some users (let's call them Alex, ...
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Prevent users from immediately deleting their accounts if they've made one post
I'm posting this following the discussion at Should we disallow users from immediately deleting their accounts if they've made one post?, which seems to be positive and generally in favor of doing ...
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Should we disallow users from immediately deleting their accounts if they've made one post?
When a user wants to delete their account, if they have posted 0 or 1 times, their account is deleted immediately; otherwise, they have to wait 24 hours for their account to be deleted after ...
4
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1
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Weird spam / comment combination
I flagged this post on math.se. It got closed quickly after that.
Shortly afterwards, I received this comment on a completely unrelated post. I think the comment is gone, and looking at the only user ...
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Is Stack Exchange becoming more focused on funny or entertaining content rather than actual useful information?
It feels like Stack Exchange has basically turned into Reddit in a way. With a lot of SEs like Workplace.SE, Academia.SE, IPS.SE, Worldbuilding.SE, etc.
These SEs are used mostly to kill time/read ...
user312016
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Dealing with serial trolls
It's not unheard of for some poor soul to decide to try to troll SO under different accounts for a couple hours. It's happening right now on SO. This is probably the third time I've seen this happen, ...
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Troll usurps opponent's user name – What to do? [duplicate]
A well-known crank, let's call him "Wolfgang", uses ten different sock-puppets to dump his pseudo-scientific nonsense into several Stack Exchange sites. Every time another user, let's call him "Uwe", ...
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How does Stack Exchange stimulate honest, open discourse while limiting the effects of trolling?
The following question: If you're gonna talk Politics, you must respect those who disagree mirrors my sentiment way more eloquently. But I'm looking for less of a discussion and more of a clear-cut ...
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Rash of trolling on SF&F, none of our mods are online
Someone is trolling SF&F pretty hard right now, and none of our mods seem to be around. Can we get some CM assistance?
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Is there a formal policy on controversial (i.e., defamatory or opinionated) topics: Racist queries on Biology SE?
I cannot believe that
Someone would ask a loaded question about general, racist, behavioral cultural stereotypes on StackExchange (cf. eugenics).
That some users would attempt to answer/discuss/...
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Dissuading trolls: increase reputation cost for downvote on answers
Some quality users leave Stack Exchange because of a slight imbalance in the current voting system
The ultimate problem is that *some* people who write quality answers are driven away by a *slight* ...
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2
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1
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What about someone use "receives 6 spam or offensive flags:−100" rule? [duplicate]
What if a bunch of jealous bad guys just want to interfere with SE Community and they decide to cast 6 spam flags on an innocent person? Will the poor guy lose 100 hard earned reputations?
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Achievements can be used against us by trolls
See this:
It's real. (Thanks Manishearth for helping me on this!)
Any user with upvote privilege can simply click the upvote button repeatedly to cause this to any other user, at any time.
How ...
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What should we do with troll chatrooms?
This room... well, I don't even know what to say about it. What action should I take for a "sex" room?
This question and this one suggest flagging the specific messages that are bad, but ...
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What legal options exist to Stack Exchange to prosecute aggressive users/trolls?
At the electronics Stack Exchange site, Electrical Engineering, we have been plagued by a particular user for a while. (I am not a moderator there and haven't reached the 10k reputation level which ...
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Gaming flag counts, thanks to trolls
So by now, I'm going to assume that we are familiar with the mod-wsgi troll (refer here, here, and there's a lot more, but this should be enough to make my point).
After a while, I decided to flag ...
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Who handles the trolls?
eg: All morning on the PHP tag there have been so many questions by brand new 1-rep users that are just so completely off-base that I feel like someone is trying to troll SO. I know that the PHP tag ...
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How do you deal with legitimate questions from a troll?
What do you do about legitimate questions from the Python Newbie guy (for those who don't know)? Should I flag them as spam and downvote them, or should I leave them alone?
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A user is trying to vandalize posts with abusive speech
This user is repeatedly suggesting edits which adds profanity to posts. This is the latest example.
Posting here doesn't seem like the right way for me to bring this up; I'm following the accepted ...
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Should I report another account that appears to have been hijacked?
I noticed the following comment on this question
No, this cannot be done in Python, but only in Visual Basic. Or in C, using #define 0 1.
I flagged it as:
This looks to be trolling. Not only ...
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How to notify moderators about repeated invalid edits
There is an user that continue to vandalize posts. He hasn't enough reputation to modify posts, but he's still trying to do it(I've reject at least 3 suggested edits for vandalism in the last few ...
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2
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How do I tell if my question / answer is being trolled / sock-puppeted?
Here is the question / answer. There are three nearly identical answers from three brand new users (Mike, Luds, Ronaldo August Vasquez) over the course of the existence of the question, two of which ...
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Policy on reputation abuse from vindictive redditor trolls?
https://stackoverflow.com/users/430062/theodore-r-smith?tab=reputation
I've angered one to two people on Reddit who have proceeded to downvote a great many of my posts in serial.
Is there anything ...
4
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Dealing with downvote trolling [duplicate]
In the past few days, somebody has been randomly downvoting several of my questions.
I know SO has an automated script that detects this kind of actions using a threshold, but sometimes trolls have ...
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Is there some built-in feature to repel trolls?
The (long) story
The question is below, you don't have to read "the story" to get the question.
The more popular SE sites are the more trolls they attract. I cannot (and others too) ask ...
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What does it mean to be trolling in chat?
I was using the "chat" for the first time today, I asked a question that some people interpreted as provocative, and accused me as "trolling".
If I am not mistaken trolling on SE ...
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How to be liked by the Stack Overflow community, or to ignore the haters
Over the past few months, I'm noticing that (relatively speaking) my questions are
Getting low views
Not getting upvoted
Sometimes getting downvoted, en mass and quickly... then +1 by other people ...
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How can we deal with trolls in Area 51?
It seems that someone is trolling the Firearms proposal on Area 51. If you look at many of the black and white questions, someone (and it's always one vote) is voting opposite what would make sense.
...
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Can a user undelete an answer that was deleted by a moderator?
This answer, posted by a troll, had previously been deleted by a moderator (I believe it was Bill the Lizard). Recently it got undeleted, at about the same time the user made a comment under it. This ...
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Can we report / do anything about a persistent troll?
First of all, please note the precedent: Dealing with persistent trolls: “see the newsgroups guy” - Jeff himself has posted about a similarly troublesome account. This is also tangentially related ...
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How should "humorous" trolling be handled?
Consider "What coding practices are considered derogatory to the compiler? [closed]" on Stack Overflow. I imagine that the poster thinks that this is a joke. At least that is how his/her/its comments ...
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Can you add a separate discussion site? [duplicate]
Sometimes you just want to let out some steam, and troll about some technology or software. You are not looking for any answers, but for users with similar experiences and interesting stories. So why ...
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Distinguishing newbies from trolls at a glance
I'm aware of the related questions, but I feel that this remains an issue.
I occasionally encounter "bad" users on SO. They are the exception! But it would be nice to have a way to keep track of them,...
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Suggestion: Maybe add "trolling" to the list of reasons a comment can be flagged?
I've seen some discussions here on meta-SO where moderators have said that the appropriate action for a user who appears to be trolling in comments is to click the "Flag this comment as offensive, ...
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Dealing with persistent trolls: "see the newsgroups guy"
This guy keeps appearing, and we're not sure why.
He posts anywhere between 5 - 12 of the same sort of "answers":
Use native Win32 zip dll apis (used by IE) Never use external DLLs on Windows !
...
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