How do MNHQ know if it's a troll??

[kirsten123]

Are they blimming psychic or summat?
Do they phone you up to check?

People change details to protect anonymity. This is not how you spot a troll.

I have it on good authority that HQ use ducking stools.

Bridges

they might have said on previous threads that they are married with five kids whereas under their NC they might only have 2 dc and be single y'know.

What's wrong with that? Surely, people NC may want to alter details for legitimate reasons - privacy concerns or being outed?

Is that a terrible thing that leads to banning?

Well I was only making a suggestion! If your details are wildly different from thread to thread then yes it's going to set alarm bells of at MNHQ.

Don't ask me whats wrong with that ask MNHQ..........

They check IP addresses. People with the same IP to multiple usernames are more than likely trolls. They prob post on their same op with a different username also. Easy for MN to suss out they are trolls.

If you disagree with any of the men hating idiots on here then you MUST be a troll and not a level headed individual who isn't scarred in life...

CheersMedea ~ poor choice of user name on my part, and being a man posting on a predominately female board - apparently raised some questions. Sorted in the end, but an email before the ban and pulling the thread would have been nice.

They send an email out saying 'are you a troll or what' and if they get one back saying 'yum yum yum I love me some billy goats' that's how they know.

They ask Anyfucker

Doesn't always apply Joysmum. AF posted on a thread that's getting zapped.

IP addresses and email addresses compared with known trolls/other accounts. Also they obviously know your name changes.

They send an email out saying 'are you a troll or what' and if they get one back saying 'yum yum yum I love me some billy goats' that's how they know.

Ohhh I can't believe that about Hotpot - I was worried about that woman!! All that stuff about her husband preceding bigger ladies though

Prefering even.
Maybe the same troll who posted the similar one today that's been taken down and they know because of IP addresses?

it's a narrow line isn't it, some people's lives really sound unbelievable but are true, banning them if they're true might mean you're banning someone who wants and needs the advice here.

Name change for this.

I had a previous account suspended after being (incorrectly) labelled a troll on here. As far as I can tell, the things I did that set alarm bells ringing were:

1. Starting a new account just to start a thread about a particular issue (guilty, but at that time I didn't know that it was possible to change names)
2. Saying a few things that didn't mesh with posts from my usual account, e.g. giving slightly different ages of my DCs (guilty, and I did this because I was afraid of outing myself)
3. When my account was suspended, I immediately created a new one instead of contacting MNHQ about it (guilty - I did this because I thought it was a problem with the site, and I wasn't particularly attached to the account I'd created anyway so starting a new account and being able to post straight away seemed less hassle than contacting MN and waiting to get it sorted out)
4. The thread I'd started was 'unusually dramatic', or words to that effect.

Points 1-3 are lessons learned. Point 4 made me feel like absolute shit. I was at a really low point in my life and having someone basically say 'what you say you're going through sounds like such a nightmare that we think you must have made it up' made me feel cut off, alone, and pretty desperate.

But I do accept that it must be difficult for MNHQ to keep order on these discussion boards, and without the time and resources to check out every single poster, it's inevitable that there will the the odd troll who goes undetected as well as the odd genuinely desperate person who is unfairly branded a troll.

Can't work out why the 'my boyfriend is friends with his ex' thread got deleted though ...

Also they know which web browser you use.

www.useragentstring.com

Some of these can be very specific.

It's also possible to detect a specific phone or tablet. Something rarer, like a Galaxy Grand would be more of a pointer towards it being the same user, than say an iPad.

I have loads of registered names, and so do plenty of other posters. Some people like to namechange, it's not necessarily for evil trolling purposes. I guess checking background stories has something to do with it.

No, no, Joy. Everybody gets fooled by trolls on occasion. Advance search (and a good memory with a nose for bullshit) is your friend

Ah well your new username definitely should help clear that up!

I have RL friends who's lives are terribly dramatic though...

Brooks Newmark...she was pretending to be his wife or something??

I can tell you what the deleted Hotpot threads were about, having been an avid follower and contributor. OP claimed to have discovered an email account of her husband's in which the only emails (thousands of them) were to and from some mystery woman. The mystery woman was apparently a former webcam girl (which is how he 'met' her) whom he'd fallen in love with, tried to leave OP for, but then ended up with a platonic but close friendship. There was the odd mention about the webcam woman attending a Labour party conference, as well as various hints about her name and appearance, and apparently (though I missed this) hints about what she'd written on Twitter. It looks as if the threads were pulled because of a suspicion that the OP was trying to smear someone linked to the Labour party, although this might just be Chinese whispers ...

They are alerted by the poster's registration info, especially surnames such as Gruff or Capricorn, and any address such as 3 Mossy Arch.

Surely this is a thread for Site Stuff (or whatever it's called).

Gruff, 3 Mossy Arch

There's another thread just started this afternoon that's got hairy handed all over it....some of them aren't even very good at trollery.

I'm sad.
Hotpot didn't exist.
The man I got engaged to didn't really exist.
Defo Daily Mail sad face!