Slashdot trolling phenomena: Encyclopedia II - Slashdot trolling phenomena - Disruptive trolls

Slashdot trolling phenomena - Disruptive trolls

The purpose of disruptive trolls is to cause the pages of Slashdot to display in an undesirable way or to otherwise bring attention to themselves. The two major categories of disruptive trolls are crapflooding and page-widening.

Slashdot trolling phenomena - Crapflooding

Crapflooding is the posting of many nonsensical or gratuitously offensive messages in order to disrupt the normal functioning of Slashdot and annoy its users and editors.

Later versions of Slash, the software behind the Slashdot website, had an updated lameness filter to prevent posting of the same message more than once. However, crapflooders began avoiding this restriction by varying the content of the message after each post. Crapfloods can be performed manually with a dedicated user repeatedly clicking through the posting options each time, or automated by a piece of software. Automated crapfloods are — not surprisingly — larger, more effective and more frequent. The subject of crapflooded messages varies. Some examples include:

• Offtopic Messages
• Pornographic/Homoerotic sex scenes with the names replaced with those of the slashdot editors or open source celebrities.
• Incoherent nonsense that contains the correct letter frequencies so the lameness filter recognises it as vaguely English.
• Offensive Base64 encoded images or text.

Warning, potentially offensive external links:

• An example of crapflooding
• Another crapflood example

Slashdot trolling phenomena - Page widening/lengthening

The original page widening posts were simple messages consisting of one long stream of characters with no spaces. This caused browsers to render a very wide page with horizontal scroll bars, making it nearly impossible to read the comments page. Slashdot began inserting spaces into any long run of characters to prevent this and so began the evolutionary battle between Slashcode and the page widening trolls. Newer and more inventive ways of causing page widening were discovered, with the use of blockquote tags and the "." character to cause extreme widening on Internet Explorer. These methods were also eventually closed off by the Slashdot editors. Improvements in browser software have also closed many of the loopholes used to widen pages.

Examples of pagewidening include:

• a slashdot page widened ("fixed" by the Lameness filter)
• a pagewidening post using blockquote tags (also "fixed" by the Lameness filter)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Disruptive trolls", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki