From: rra@stanford.edu 
  
 Richard Henry  writes: 
 > "Russ Allbery"  wrote: 
  
 >> Constantly responding to trolls with the same post is one of the most 
 >> obnoxious things that I think the non-trolls can do.  It borders on 
 >> newsgroup flooding, just like the trolling does, and is almost as 
 >> abusive.  It seems to be the recourse of people who know that they 
 >> shouldn't be feeding the trolls but who haven't quite mustered 
 >> sufficient self-control to actually not do it. 
  
 > I am sorry it bothers you.  Getting vaccinations bothers me, but I do it 
 > when my doctor recommends. 
  
 Vaccinations help.  This doesn't.  If you have a doctor recommending it, 
 you'd better get a better doctor, since the one you have is incompetent. 
  
 Think of it this way:  You're letting the troll consume your time.  Pretty 
 much by definition, the troll is going to have more free time to waste on 
 this than you are.  Therefore, not only are you being utterly obnoxious 
 and annoying to everyone around you and likely to lose your own standing 
 in the newsgroup and end up being killfiled by all the people killfiling 
 the troll, you're also playing a losing game with someone who knows they 
 can beat you at it and will proceed to do so mercilessly. 
  
 It's just stupid. 
  
 > It is not abusive when it is a response to a campaign of lies. 
  
 That's your opinion.  It's not mine.  It is, in fact, against Stanford's 
 terms of service and I would take action against a Stanford user doing 
 this as readily as any other style of newsgroup flooding. 
  
 This is very old ground, well-trod in the net-abuse groups years ago, and 
 your opinion is not the consensus of either news administrators or spam 
 cancellers. 
  
 The idea that you have to refute every lie posted is pure nonsense.  The 
 people reading the newsgroup are not binary toggle switches who will 
 believe the last thing they read; they're quite capable of getting the 
 point when someone is spewing the same thing over and over again and 
 people who know what they're talking about have given up and started 
 filtering it out.  Normal Internet users understand perfectly well what 
 spam is and know that mindless repetition is not the same thing as proof. 
 Give the readers some respect and realize they're as likely to be able to 
 draw common-sense conclusions as you are. 
  
 -- 
 Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)              
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)