Online discussion forums can be strange places. Perfectly normal and rational people can quickly turn into obnoxious idiots within seconds if someone ‘presses their buttons’.

Another kind of person you will encounter are people who say things that they wouldn’t have the guts to say to your face. They are quite happy to tell you what a total idiot you are and call you all sorts of names. These keyboard warriors just make me laugh for being such cowards in real life – there is probably something missing from their lives which make them act like this.

I visit and participate in many discussion websites, and there is always one topic that people will argue about until they are blue in the face – politics. Since the General Election in the UK, people are in a politics frenzy. The thing is, the vast vast majority of them won’t accept that their party has ever done anything wrong. The people posting make up lies, divert away from the subject, bluff, don’t answer questions and generally make themselves look dumb. So they are a bit like politicians themselves. Invariably after people start shouting abuse at each other someone will post a picture of something ‘clever’ like a tennis match – watching the ball constantly going back and forward.

A person I have encountered myself is a user called ‘lalla’ on Famous Male Forums.

For some reason they have taken a dislike to me – and sent me a private message saying so. They said they have noticed I am always getting my 10p in threads – well that is kind of the idea of a discussion forum right? They are also totally ignored the fact that they actually post more often than me. They ended it with ‘like you don’t have anything better to do’. Again, it is a discussion forum that they post on more often than me. I wasn’t able to reply to the private message because they had disabled that feature – so that just makes them a coward.

So anyway, I got up this morning and checked my email as usual. They had left a comment in a thread overnight that I had posted on just before I went to bed. It said “your a Fool & Idiot !” (exactly like that, they need an English lesson I know). So they decided to leave it until they figured there were no mods about – coward. After half an hour they edited the post to remove it. But they didn’t realise I had an email subscription so I knew exactly what was written first time around.

Does it bother me? No. From looking at their other posts it seems like their primary objective is to be as rude as possible to everyone. So, has lalla “not got better things to do”? Because they seem to think I haven’t, but quite happily go around trolling themselves.

I am a firm believe that people who exhibit this behaviour (trolling) have minor (sometimes mental) health problems. For example they may lack social skills and are unaware of how to behave within groups of people. Maybe they were bullied through their childhood so they think what they are doing is perfectly acceptable, or maybe they know it is wrong but choose to do it anyway.

You often need to be thick-skinned to participate on discussion forums. YGL is one where you don’t though. Do you know what the single most likely thing is to get peoples backs up? The rolleyes smiley.