Sunday, October 10th, 2010
Issue: 50   Editor: SeanGoesToUni


COLUMN: Stop Trolling, Fools! IAmAceAdam
A very common occurrence that we see in almost every topic nowadays on Bootleggers is the widely spread disease known as Trolling! Trolling is when a player typically unleashes a sarcastic or cynical remark to another innocent player in their topic. Basically, it’s just acting like a prick over a computer. Because of this, it has a major impact on the Bootleggers community nowadays and the lack of activity in the forum. Bootleggers is into its 7th year now and in my opinion, the community is in the worst state it has ever been. Previous resets and years have had the game forum constantly active and fun to be a part of. Now it’s just deadly quiet with the odd troll stumbling through to share their narrow minded lame thoughts with another player.

I decided to see how bad trolling really is by randomly checking out topics in the Off Topic Forum and seeing what the first few posts were in each topic. HDO SeanGoesToUni made a topic about how he was one of three student reps to be picked from his university! Within the first two posts, two trolls interfered and then an argument escalated into nothing, killing off the topic totally. I also checked another topic made by a player called xArmiranged which he posted a youtube video of a song he is currently enjoying. Immediately, the first comment was by another troll calling him “A complete faggot.” I could really carry on naming various topics, but you’d get bored of reading it. It’s obvious what the pattern is though.

So I made a topic on the Game Forum earlier, asking the players how they feel about the Bootleggers community nowadays and how it used to be before. Bodhisattva, better known as Mags, the EX Head-DJ for Bootcast, posted about how staff interaction needs to be re-introduced. I asked him what exactly he wanted the staff to act on and he replied with, “Trolls need to be firmly stamped out. And to answer the ‘but they will just make a new account’ then staff, you need to keep banning.” He also mentioned that the rule of topic hijacking needs to be enforced. Mags then went on to put some of the blame on BSF2000, branding him lazy and taking away the good features that the players loved.His main point in his post comes when he mentioned who needs to make the initial move to attempt to bring the community back. The staff need to start cleaning up the place and deal with the morons that are trolling and hijacking topics. Bootleggers did have a tool called the KO button which gave the creator of the topic the power to kick anyone out of their topic, but this was removed shortly after, rumoured to be because it was overly used and was stopping debates etc.

So, what needs to be done to bring back the good old Bootleggers community we all used to know and love? I reckon the KO button needs to be brought back; if trolls were continuously kicked out of topics, they’d eventually get bored and either change or never log in again. Staff interaction needs to be stepped up dramatically; Just like Mags said, trolls need to be firmly stamped out. A rule should be formed warning continuous trolls that they could face a temporary ban or a mute from the forums or even maybe introduce “Forum HDO’S” which bases their job on the forums alone and diverting trolling and hijacking. Finally, there should be a rule made about Topic Hijacking; If it was an official rule, then it would be less of an occurrence. In conclusion, players attitudes needs to change and staff need to step up their game and be more ruthless when it comes to trolls.

Thanks for reading,
AceAdam!