Beware Trolls Ahead

About 6-9 months ago (When I was still in high school) someone on MSN Messenger had added me. After saying a few things to this guy to make a conversation and to find out who he was, he started making threats and insults. Now normally I would've block this kind of person and removed him off my list thinking that he's probably some weirdo trying to prank a random person (me). But this guy was different, he knew who I was, where I lived and which school I went to. By now more then one red alarm was going off in my head, to be honest, I was panicking for the first 10 minutes.

What I did?

With further investigation I found out that this person was someone from my class. After asking my friends if they were behind this prank, after getting a "no" from each of them I soon realised who it was. It was one of the bullies that I had gotten into trouble during my junior years his name is Patrick. I quickly decided to block him so I would cut off his way of insulting me and getting away with it, besides I wasn't going to waste my time arguing back at him.

Note: Make sure you remember this. No matter what kind of bully your up against, they're either A. Doing it because it wants to attract others attention or B. It's doing it because it know he or she can and that he'll get away with it.

What is a troll?

Here's a good extract from Wikipedia " In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed to intentionally annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion as their only purpose.".

My recommendation to others

If it's a 1 on 1 messenger service like MSN/AIM/Yahoo then you can allways block and delete them so you won't need to worry about them again. If it's a chatroom that your in, most recently developed chatrooms will have some sort of "mute" functionality where you can't see their message. And lastly if it's a forum, you can allways make a complaing to the moderators and they'll deal with that person. The previous suggestions should only be done if the bully is some random guy having a go at you and not a stalker that knows personal details of you, in this case asking family and friends is the best sollution, also try to find out who it could be and why they would do such a thing (detectives call this "motive").

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