Trolltalk

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Trolltalk (also known as 20721, sid 20721 or sid=20721) is a hidden story ID on the online news discussion forum Slashdot, where Slashdot trollers used to converse amongst themselves, sometimes demonstrating new trolling techniques, bragging about successful trolling and insulting each other. Trolltalk is the oldest active SID on Slashdot, and has received more posts over its lifetime than any other SID, but due to Slashcode's purge feature, only the most recent two weeks of posts remain at any given time. Although the two-week post count is usually in the thousands, at least 95% of the posts are intentionally content-free "crapfloods" generated by automated posting scripts, with the remaining handful being written by the various people who visit the forum.

The current trolltalk was predated by an earlier thread with the textual SID "trolltalk". It was created in 2000, when, due to a bug, SlashCode allowed arbitrary alphanumeric SIDs. There were several other custom SIDs created during this time as well, such as "sid=2dollarcrackho", "sid=k223320inchfan" and "sid=10gramspoppylatex". When Slashdot was upgraded to SlashCode 2.0 the bug was fixed but there was a short-lived new feature called "user-created discussions" which featured numeric SIDs. Soon thereafter new trolltalks were created such as 20721, 31337 and 20384. With the exception of 20721 they have all been deleted or disabled over the years. 31337 was closed due to abuse, and the others were automatically deleted by Slashcode's purge feature after not receiving any posts for two weeks.

Following the changes in Slashcode intended to make trolling harder by banning users for as little as one negative moderation, the discussion became highly variable. In the past, during non-crapflood periods when regular discussions took place on the sid, most of the conversations centered around dating tips, racist jokes and racism in general, discussions of Dance Dance Revolution and Alternate Reality Gaming, admissions and discussions of "cutting", various fanboy arguments, flaming of other past and present trolltalk users, and occasional attacks on various forums outside of Slashdot. The trolltalk community once claimed to exert significant pressure on Slashdot by creating huge threads where people would argue irrelevant and deliberately incorrect points. Although trolling on Slashdot is still an occasional pastime, much of the activity concerns easier targets, usually with a more naive userbase and less sophisticated (or absent) comment moderation system. The goal is often total destruction of a target forum/community via automated crapflooding, exploitation of security flaws and harassment of the site operators.

Slashdot's moderation system is little used on trolltalk, since the community is relatively small and obscure, and its users rarely receive mod points. Due to this and the fact that few "normal" Slashdot users visit the SID it is essentially a zone without rules. In the past, the anonymous nature of trolltalk has led users to post nude photographs of themselves or to admit personal details about themselves that they would not otherwise admit, such as homosexuality, "cutting", or Ephebophilia. In the past, members of the community who are angry at having been insulted or losing an argument (or were simply bored) have used automated scripts to flood trolltalk with random messages for days or weeks, making any discussion nearly impossible. Crapfloods are a regular occurrence and are considered a part of trolltalk culture, although they frequently annoy users who wish to chat. During crapfloods, normal posting to trolltalk is typically reduced or eliminated until the crapflood ends, as has been the case during the current extended crapflooding of trolltalk that began around May 2005.

Before discussion on trolltalk was mostly halted by the start of the current ongoing crapfloods, most of the discussion over the past year had been about two women, Cracky-chan and Mercatur. Although neither woman was a user of trolltalk, both had a number of fans there, and a bitter rivalry developed with fans of each waging violent flame-wars against fans of the other. Unknown parties registered the domain names cracky-chan.com and mercatur.org and turned them into redirects to trolltalk.

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Crapflood

As mentioned earlier, the current trolltalk is now under attack from a sophisticated crapflood, rendering trolltalk all but unusable except for the most avid readers. This was believed to have started to punish other trolltalkers who insulted the crapflooder.

In December 2005 and January 2006, as an attempted anti-crapflood measure, a trolltalk user created and used software whose goal was to generate and publish a web page containing links to non-crapflood posts on trolltalk. The project was briefly successful at filtering out crapfloods until the crapflooder modified the crapflooding script. After a period of downtime, the digest has resumed but fails to filter out much of the crapflood.

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Defunct trolltalk spinoffs

Trolltalk Archive - Since Slashdot removes the oldest comments from user-created SIDs, a now-defunct Trolltalk Archive was created. Originally posts were manually imported from saved trolltalk pages sent by an anonymous contributor and subsequently by writing an automated script to extract the contents of trolltalk. The archive was database-driven and had advanced search capabilities. The archive ceased operation in mid-2005.

Trollback Journal - The Slashdot "TrollBack" (the name is an allusion to "Slashback") once compiled and published in his journal a list and of featured trolls over the past time period (usually a calendar month)with reviews and commentary. TrollBack has been defunct since October 2004.

7r0117a1K - This was an alternate trolltalk, sid 31337, that rivaled sid 20721 in popularity for a time. Some users participated in both sids, while some were loyal to only one and engaged in wars against the "enemy" sid, often "moving" undesirable messages from one's own sid to the other sid. The closure of 31337 occurred on September 15, 2004 as a result of an automated trojan horse that was advertising compromised IP addresses via the SID. The name "7r0117a1K" and its sid "31337" are references to Leet_speak.

Trolltalks on other sites - At various times, trolltalk sids were created on other web forums. Although they are no longer actively used, some may still be viewed. The most well known of these is Kuro5hin's version of trolltalk.

Adequacy.org - This website was started by a number of trolltalk users attempting to reach a wider audience with their trolling. It ceased operation in September 2002 but its archives may still be viewed.

Trolltalk.net - A user of trolltalk set up a spinoff website using Scoop software at this address. It did not become popular and died a year later. The site no longer exists.

Geekizoid.com - Another user of trolltalk set up a spinoff website using Slash software at this address. Despite its creator being disliked by most of trolltalk and considered an enemy, the site lasted several years. The site no longer exists, although its founder runs an alternate site, Sporks-R-Us, which was once considered a trolltalk spinoff but is now only tangentially so.

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External links

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