Agreed upon signal that OP is a troll?

[SinclairSpectrum]

I have been here a while but still get caught out by troll / goudy fucker threads sometimes.
I end up feeling a right tit when the penny drops.
I realise that a thread can be reported and the MNHQ sleuths then get to work but can't we agree on a universal 'heads up' signal to post that suggests all may not be as it seems?

The best lighthearted troll thread ever was by a longstanding poster in disguise posting about her greedy DH eating cakes that were 'condemned, and waiting to be thrown out. There were some touches of pure genius like the OP living somewhere where there weren't any birds and making completely irrelevant references to her DD's 'so called boyfriend' being a 'vegetarian'
What did dizzymare do or can't it be mentioned?

'Green' trolls don't bother me; they're lighthearted, and usually funny. They add to the site.

Amber trolls, I ignore. And report if needed.

Red trolls, report, report, report. And I occasionally send anyone getting sucked in a PM heads up.

And Ive been accused of making things up before, smurf arse to be precise. It didn't bother me, because I knew I was t making it up. Plus it gave a fair few of you a good laugh, which was my intention. If you can't laugh at yourself, pfft.

The5Daychicken, you describe exactly why troll hunting is damaging. You and probably lots of others felt unable to seek mn advise for fear of being branded a troll. I would rather feed a few trolls than deter a genuine poster from seeking help or leaving a genuine one without help if I could give it.

Unusual, dramatic and tragic things are rare, but not unheard off so I will continue to assume the poster and problem are real.

I remember that one stratter but my favourite troll thread was the Balonz one.

Personally I don't like troll thread that are meant to be funny but only because they so very rarely are and it means I can't read anything without being totally sceptical.

But I'm weird. A real life absurd happening is only funny if it's real.
If it's not real it's just a badly written farce.

AndyWarholsOrange dizymare was a poster who joined having just split from her dh and then finding out she was pregnant. Lots of talk about whether to continue the pregnancy and then deciding she would, and then finding out that it was twins.

She befriended other posters with twins but most notably at least two posters who had lost a twin either at birth or as a baby.... then it transpired she was rushed into hospital and on her way there she texted one of these posters to tell her. Said poster posted on the boards in good faith as dizzy had become a fairly prolific poster at that point. By this time lots of posters had reported as suspicious because of her inconsistencies. Anyway a couple of days later it was reported that she had given birth to the twins but due to her being just short of the cut off they had obviously died. She came back then and posted incoherently for a couple of days with lots of sympathetic posters giving support and sympathy, and then someone started a thread and risked a flaming by saying that people should be careful how much they invest in posters going through a very hard time, that there was one on the boards at this point and all didn't seem right. Some defended, most said they had been suspicious and reporting for weeks, several threads came and went and mn hq eventually banned her.

But even once she'd been banned she remained friends with some on fb, including sending messages saying that if they were out she was going to kill herself etc, she became prolific on bereavement forums, and a few months later someone on one of those forums discovered that the pictures of her dead twins were in fact pictures lifted from the internet and she apparently came clean and admitted it was all made up.

ime most of the most prolific trolls on mn have been outed publically on the boards. but we're talking longstanding posters who have posted prolifically not just ones who have posted a thread tonight and a follow up one tomorrow.

But posters like dizzymare, judgeFlounce, the fox troll, ethanchristopher, the one with the prem baby whose picture again was lifted from the net, and cvq were all publically suspected of being trolls before mn banned them.

These days there are a lot more shorter term trolls and mn do jump on them a bit more quickly. But there are still IMO some long-running saga's which are dubious... The difference now though is that because of the size of mn, a troll outing isn't as talk-worthy as it was when I first joined mn ten years ago, because the boards move much more quickly and a poster isn't as prolific now as they were back then because their threads move quickly but there are many others which move along with them iyswim.