I've worked with a number of online communities, and have come to the conclusion that the main reason "trolls" exist is to gain some kind of satisfaction/energy/ego from the responses they can exite - regardless of the content of the response. In other words, any response to a troll is actually feeding them.

We have made it SOP to NEVER respond to a troll, even to say it is a troll, and to delete it if necessary. PM is great at ranking and deleting useless or distracting posts, but I notice an over abundance of responses discussing Troll posts. I bet the trolls would shrivel and die if they never received even a single response to their posts or even a discussion of how bad they are.

Of course it would be necessary to educate new users to this policy.

In reply to Re: What a shameless attempt to win XP!! by belize
in thread What a shameless attempt to win XP!! by crazyinsomniac

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.