Me and My Troll

You know that your blog is on the internet radar when you get your own troll. My troll hangs out in the comments attached to my posting about the J*nk Br*thers. About once a week, he googles Scrimshaw J*nk Br*thers, then drops in and adds one or more comments that criticize the bros, or that criticize me for deleting his comments.

If I find his content acceptable, I leave his comment up and maybe give a smart-alec reply. If it is not acceptable, I delete it.

At first I wasn't sure about his gender, but his recent shift to remarks about sexual orientation and sexual practices force me to conclude that he is in fact a male and his mental age is no more than fifteen.

As trolls go, he's not the worst. Some bloggers after deleting troll comments have received death threats. Others are so bothered by troll's insults they have turn off all comments or even stop blogging.

Mind you, my troll has forced me to remove the "recent comments" section from my sidebar for a while. For some reason, blogspot isn't removing deleted comments from there. As soon as I get a few new comments, I'll be able to put it back in.

My old friend John is a Troll for Good

My old friend John is a Troll for Good. He is an engineering professor and he finds blogs that say global warming is a sham and posts comments pointing out the flaws in the arguments. He is unfailingly polite, addresses only the science, stays away from the politics, and ignores the personal attacks made against him. He tells me that after a couple of weeks, the blogs either shut down or stop talking about global warming. When this happens, he goes looking for another pseudo-science blog to shut down.

Unfortunately, because my opinions are so highly rational, I won't be attracting a Troll for Good, but as this blog grows in popularity, I'm sure to get more evil trolls. I expect any day now I'll get one who will suggest that binder clips are over-rated.