The ability of a troll to consume bandwidth, emotional space, time and space on a page is a real threat. We need to consider the nature of the threat, what their goals are, how we can respond to protect ourselves and at the same time preserve the forum. This is going to get worse. Link this thread and the last one. The Enemy or enemies want to preempt our defenses by getting us to abandon the field, to self censor ourselves and assure them that we will not contest the battlefield of ideas or communicate with each other. Personally I would rather spend an hour arguing the virtues of German Cheese with Marie Claude than watching a troll perform onanism. We do need to remember that we come here to learn and if we seal ourselves off from intelligent disagreement then we become an echo chamber and the forum dies. That would please those who are malicious.