I hereby declare this day to be International Troll Day on Plurk!

There must be something about the autumn equinox (also today) that makes the trolls all come out to play.

Last night, someone posted on three otherwise relatively innocent threads on Plurk where there were lively conversations ongoing. However, when he was engaged in the discussion by the others on the thread, he began to hog it, throwing out as many as five to six posts each time in a seeming effort to prove that he was erudite. In the end, he ended up hijacking two of the threads (it seems he lost interest in one of them). Subtle hints got nowhere as he threw out half-baked dictionary definitions, highfalutin theories, and refused to accept any point of view not his own. For everything said to him, he came back with a "yes but" answer. Even an outright statement that he was hijacking the thread earned the poster a reply several posts long, defining the term "hijack" and outlining the reasons and technicalities proving he was not "hijacking" the thread. In the end, the people who originally posted the plurks got fed up and blocked him.

Did this stop this person? No, sirree. He then made a plurk thread of his own, expressing his anger and frustration at the people who blocked him from their threads and intimating that they were closed-minded persons who denied him his freedom of expression by their actions. "But they are public plurks and anyone may post in them!" he pointed out. When people explained to him, tactfully at first, that his attitude may have turned people off, he began justifying his actions in verbose detail. No one else was correct but him. He was the only right person in the world and everybody else was wrong, yet, he insisted, he was keeping an open mind.

Finally, people stopped taking his arguments seriously and went to his thread to poke fun at him instead because his antics were now verging so much on the ridiculous they were absolutely hysterical if they weren't frustrating.

Poor person. He seems to have been infected with troll-itis, as he is exhibiting unmistakable troll-like symptoms. Rather pitiable, really. All that he could see was this perfect image of himself in the mirror, unable to break away from the prison of his own reflection, not knowing that he was only looking into the Mirror of Erised and not a true mirror.

The funny thing is that, even as by his acts he seemed to long for validation of his perception that he was wise, knowledgeable, and erudite, he ended up looking like an imbecilic robot in the eyes of all else around him. One plurker whom he had alienated described him as "a sentient bot with no common sense" in frustration. He was like something with an output port but no input port... many things came out, but nothing could go in.

Poor thing. In real life he wouldn't have any friends, as he would alienate them all. But then who said trolls had any friends anyway? They are sufficient unto their own existence and need no one but themselves.

In the end, there is only one way to deal with a troll: to fall back upon the tried-and-tested Internet adage "Do not feed the trolls."