What has happened to this place?
The only relevant topics are 20 pages of rants from the same 5/6 people, lately counting others who I’d never have seen fall into this.
Has Pudlo won?
Fair question. I think most of us were just bored.
But in a koan sort of way, doesn’t it makes us a troll too? I mean…umm, forget it.
You just blew my mind! 
Sure. Every time we feed a troll we’re perpetuating the cycle. Poe called it “the imp of the perverse”, for people who are fully aware that their best intentions will only feed the flames (guilty as charged).
But, we’re also trying to disarm the troll, and disarm the situation. Whether it’s by laughing him off, confronting him directly, or attempting sane dialogue in hopes of a productive exchange, we’re trying to steer things back to construction, rather than disruption.
So the troll is the disrupting influence, that does make some people around them slight more disruptive as well, but these people are geared mostly towards getting rid of the disruption. Can’t muck out shit without getting dirty, basically, and shit washes off.
Best plan? Don’t talk to the troll. But when trolls put on guises of actually wanting to make rational conversation, it becomes harder to recognise them, and some dumb people (guilty again) take way longer than others and actually talk rationally to them as though that was going to do any good.
Right now, all I can think of is “Endless, Nameless”. If you’ve played it, you’ll know why. The dragon spoke the truth.
If you haven’t played, what the hell are you doing reading this when you could be playing it?!
EDIT - Also… guys… we’re being rather rude now, considering Danii’s last post (third time guilty. I should get frequent guilt points).
Not at all – you put it perfectly. Thanks. And, as you say – back to IF, which is our shared purpose for being here.
LIONS!!
And with this happy note, Danii, will you please lock the thread? The temptation to feed the flames in bit high right now. OH MY GOD LOOK ECCENTRICA GALLUMBTIS!! everyone forgets about this thread
Could you please reduce your windbagginess? Your blabbing is doing more harm than the trolls.
Do you feel a cold draft between your ears? It might explain the blowing.
READ THIS BEFORE REPLYING: Before replying to Chewbacca (I’m not going to), look at the date he/she joined and use your own wisdom whether you want to reply or not.
PS. LOCK THIS DAMN THREAD MODS!
EDIT: Also, the joining time is, when converted to my time zone, 1:36 AM. The last post was made around 10:00 AM. This means, in between that time, he/she submitted a genuine looking post to be approved by the Mods for first time and then after some hours ago when he/she got the permission to post freely, he/she started spewing rage. Doesn’t it mean this person is kinda familiar with the whole process and possibly has done it before too?
AGAIN, PLEASE LOCK THIS THREAD.
I have now banned Chewbacca.
I had a suggestion. You know how the bot Alex on ifMUD “learns” from the semantic you use to teach it, as in singular/plural and such. Is it possible to use the same perl script to create another bot on this forum (if phpBB supports it) and feed it the posts of these kinds of users so that it creates somekind of semantic database of exactly what kind of grammar and word placement they used. After this, whenever you guys get a new user posting for the first time, you run his post’s text through the script and see if the semantics match any of the db entries. If it does, add that username in a PRIVATE list and whenever you come online, just glance through his/her first few posts whether they actually seem genuine or if we have another sock puppet on forum.
Yes, it will generate many false positives but the results will be accessible only to Mods. Just don’t add any automatic banning system, that’ll be problematic.
Maybe I’m talking nonsense, I don’t know.
Might be best if we let this thread die. For further discussion we have an aptly-named thread at https://intfiction.org/t/frequency-and-content/111/1.