Trolltalk
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Trolltalk (also called 20721) is a hidden SID of the online news discussion forum Slashdot, where Slashdot trolls used to converse amongst themselves, often demonstrating new trolling techniques, bragging about successful trolling and insulting eachother. Trolltalk is the oldest continuously-used thread on Slashdot, and with several thousand posts at any given time it usually has the highest post count on the site, dwarfing most of the "Hall of Fame" thread list.
The current sid was predated by an earlier thread called "sid=trolltalk" created in 2000, when—due to a bug—SlashCode allowed arbitrary alphanumeric SIDs. There were several others 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 by the Slashdot editors over the years. The closure of 31337 occurred in late 2004 as a result of an automated trojan horse that was advertising compromised IP addresses via the sid.
Following the changes in slashdot code to make trolling hard or impossible by banning users for as little as one negative moderation, the discussion has degraded into dating tips, re-hashes of racist jokes and fanboy arguments. The trolltalk community used to exert significant pressure on slashdot by creating huge threads where people would argue irrelevant and deliberately incorrect points, but this is no longer so. Trolltalk is now mostly self-contained and its users rarely post in slashdot stories and actively discourage others from doing so.
Slashdot's moderation system isn't used much on trolltalk, since the community is rather small and users rarely get mod points. Due to this and the fact that few "normal" slashdot users visit the sid it is pretty much a zone without laws. Often, frustrated members of the community who are angry at having been insulted or who lost an argument will exploit this status and use automated scripts to flood trolltalk with random messages for days or weeks, making any discussion impossible. Crapfloods are a regular occurrence and are considered by many to be part of trolltalk culture.
Trolltalk archive
Since slashdot removes the oldest comments from user-created sids, an archive has been created, by first importing saved pages from an anonymous contributor and then writing an automated script. The archive is database-driven and has advanced search capabilities.
Meta publication
The Journal of user "TrollBack" (in an allusion to "slashback") contains a review of all of the trolling behavior over the past time period (usually month). TrollBack is no longer operational.
External links
- The current location of Trolltalk (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20721&threshold=-1&commentsort=1)
- The current location of the Trolltalk archive (http://trolltalk.111mb.com)
- TrollBack's Journal (http://books.slashdot.org/~TrollBack/journal/)