Grapelamp's Guide to Datalounge

This blog is not associated with Datalounge or Mediapolis in any way, shape or form. This is a personal blog containing nothing but my personal opinions and experiences with the Datalounge forum.

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Datalounge is an anonymous forum founded in the 1990s. The website was originally dedicated to LGBTQ gossip, news and information when it began, and forums were added a few years later. Now, in 2023, Datalounge is nothing but forums. The news and front page are long gone, and the once-simple Datalounge has become a complicated, confusing, and troll-filled board with many members who certainly don't seem to be part of the LGBTQ community, but rather appear to have joined because it's anonymous and only rarely moderated. 

It's difficult enough to deal with the trolls; add in the board's confusing mechanics and unspoken rules, and the board can become completely incomprehensible to even regular users. 

This blog is my attempt to make Datalounge easier to navigate. 

However, one thing needs to be made clear: Datalounge does not provide any information to users or the public beyond what is listed in their FAQ. 

Much of what I'm going to post here on the blog is going to be information I discovered through trial and error, and absolutely none of it comes from the company itself, or moderators, or anyone with any actual knowledge of the board.

It should be noted that Datalounge has always, as far as I know, deliberately kept its users in the dark as to the mechanics of the board. Any posts asking questions of the moderator or for technical help will be deleted, unanswered. Posts about specific trolls are also deleted, though sometimes a general topic thread about moderation or trolls will stay up, though no one has any idea if it's because a moderator simply never saw the post, or if they chose to allow it to remain.

My goal is to help, but at the same time, I offer no guarantees that anything I write here will actually work if you attempt it. It's possible that I'll be wrong about something, or that I'll mention a glitch and it will get fixed, or a feature on Datalounge will be changed or removed. 

The first post I wrote was posted to r/Datalounge on Reddit, and was copied over here with a few additions and corrections. My final post is the one below this one.

It’s Discouraging To Think How Many People Are Shocked by Honesty and How Few by Deceit

 

I embarked on this personal project about Datalounge a few months ago and have worked on it off and on for a while, but over the last few weeks, have been asking myself what, exactly, the point of all this is. While I know this is going to sound like a tin-foil hat kind of thing to say, I believe there's something going on behind the scenes that would likely explain the decline of the forum, yet we are, of course, never going to know what it is.

Plainly put, Datalounge is awash in bigots, and there is no moderation to speak of, allowing misinformation, propaganda, trolling, and hate speech to flourish. In the past, certain words would be blocked from use completely; these days, the only word that is blocked is a troll's real name. The owners of Datalounge aren't doing even the bare minimum of moderation, and the site has turned into a veritable pit.

To illustrate, I spent about 15 minutes looking for examples of the kind of everyday hate speech found on DL, and quickly came up with over a dozen:

Sometimes these trolls get a redtag, but it's very rare. For example, here is one particularly bad troll. Note the date of 30 September 2022:

This troll, however, did not get banned and redtagged until at least April of 2023, meaning the troll was allowed free reign to post for several months, at the very least. Note the date of 18 April 2023 on the post below, meaning Troll #6045 was posting for at least seven months between the post above and this one, written about Ralph Yarl, the teen who was shot by a homeowner when the teen went to the wrong house to pick up his brothers:

Further, if you're not a member of Datalounge and not logged in, you won't see a redtag at all, or any indication that the post had been moderated. Here's what the above post looks like when you're logged out:

You can test for yourself: the thread is here, and when it inevitably gets deleted, you can find the archive here. Look at it both when you're logged in and when you're logged out.

This means that any moderation DL does is only for members; the general public reading the thread will see the slurs, misinformation, and troll posts as originally posted. 

DL is only using an ineffective, cosmetic form of moderation to fool their own members.

Another example: Datalounge also used to block links to particularly grotesque websites, but that disappeared years ago, about the same time the word filters disappeared. Now, there are two sites they supposedly "ban," The Independent UK and the Daily Mail. However, all posted links to both of those "banned" websites still work. All DL does is insert an automatic text in the post that says, in a roundabout way, "don't click on this link," but the link is still viable. 

Since DL did used to ban links -- and in fact banned links to CNN for a while, supposedly for technical reasons -- it's almost certain that they could block these links if they wanted to, but have chosen not to. Again, they have chosen a cosmetic "solution" of making it look like the link is banned, but it is not.

There's one other thing I would like to note about Datalounge which, on the surface, may not seem related, but I believe it is: They apparently still host advertising for companies that went out of business years ago. As I was doing research for this blog, I discovered people claiming that on some browsers, ads for a company that went out of business years ago were still showing up, apparently having been hard-coded into the website. (The threads where this was mentioned were deleted, of course, but there's an old mention of it here, archived here. That thread is worth reading to see how users were reacting to the fact that, in 2021, during Primetime, the lack of trolls was noticeable. Note however, that as of the end of 2022, it became obvious that the trolls were now paying members.)

I did a little investigating and found that it was true, on the Chrome browser, RealJock ads were still hardcoded into Datalounge as of April 2023, though the company went out of business in 2021.

The point in all this is that clearly, the people who run Datalounge do not care about its public image, nor do they want or even need advertising dollars.

This seems odd to me, given that at least two of the owners of Datalounge are very publicly liberal, having co-authored books about how bad George W. Bush and Trump had been as presidents, appeared in social diaries at liberal events, and publicly endorsed liberal political candidates. 

Further, the only people who work at Mediapolis are the four owners. There are no employees who could be making these mistakes or decisions, it's only the owners who are behind Datalounge and how it operates.

After the dotcom crash of 2000–2001 and the events of 9/11, [the four owners of] Mediapolis took the decidedly un-billionaire-like decision to scale the company down from seventeen employees to just the four of them.

This information is public, but I'm not going to link to it or name any of the company's four owners.

All I'm going to say about any of this is that I personally cannot think of any good explanation for what's going on at Datalounge. The situation has gone far beyond incompetence and neglect, and there's almost no chance that the owners are not aware of the content on the board. They do not seem to be the kind of people who would allow a forum to turn into a haven for the types of trolls that abound, yet that's exactly what they've done.

I have an old but good example of this right here. This is a screen grab of two replies from someone who had posted as an official Moderator account several years ago. It's from 2018, when we were allowed to put as many people on Ignore as we wanted, which is why they were ignored user #350. (Archived copy. Second thread here, archived copy here.)

Look at the last reply in that Beto O'Rourke thread. That was from a Moderator, talking about a troll infestation. When I saw that reply, I got curious and used ignore-dar on that user, the Moderator. I looked at their other replies, and what I found was this:

Does that sound like someone who is just fine with the white supremacists on Datalounge? No, it absolutely does not, so why is that person, a moderator, ignoring and allowing so much racist content on the forum?

This is what I cannot understand, and why I think that it's likely that my entire project here was simply tilting at windmills. There's no explanation for any of this that anyone is ever going to get. 

I'm sure the owners know why this is allowed, but for the life of me, I cannot come up with even one explanation that makes sense. They're not bigots themselves, that much is obvious. They can't be allowing all the trolling just for the money, because there's no real advertising income to be had; they're using some of their advertising space right now for a company that went out of business and cannot possibly have paid them anything for over two years at this point. Their subscription costs are quite low, and as anyone who visits the site during Primetime lockdowns can tell you, there can't be that many paid members anyway. The forum is not such an important source of information that they're leaving it up for informative reasons; in fact, they recently deleted almost everything that was posted before the year 2021. There are no archives.

You'll have noticed that a bunch of posts on this blog went live today, 2 June 2023. That was me clearing out drafts of posts I had been working on. I stopped gathering information a few weeks back when I did a little experiment that used the ignore function and inadvertently discovered a big troll account pulling a months-long sympathy ploy. Others had pointed it out many months ago, yet they got flagged and grayed out, insulted, and even one death threat, just for trying to warn people. Compounding the situation was an alleged expert with scientific knowledge joining in on the thread, but posting incorrect information, making unverified claims, as well as claiming to be located in a large U.S. city, yet using English/Canadian spellings. After 15 long posts over the course of several months, nobody noticed. 

When I started this project, I was convinced Dataloungers simply did not understand what trolling was, that they were not exposed to it enough to recognize it when it happened, and that maybe I could help. After seeing the above thread, I have decided that Dataloungers are incapable and unwilling to recognize trolling, even when they see it first-hand. They can be spoon-fed examples of trolling and yet refuse to believe it, and for no reason other than they simply do not want to. Datalounge has selected for that kind of user.

Between the inexplicable decision of management to allow Datalounge to become a hate speech and misinformation clearinghouse, and the fact that so many Dataloungers who remain on the board are fine with it, even encouraging of it, I've decided that the work I did on this project was mostly of no use. I'm not going to delete it, but I am certain, at this point, that Datalounge was always beyond help, and I simply did not realize it until I took a look under the surface.

Datalounge Glossary

 

I have no idea if this is necessary or even useful, but here's a small glossary of Datalounge terms:

Asbestos Eyeballs: A setting in what Datalounge calls "The Flames & Freaks Slider." Access it in the top black bar toward the right under "Settings." On the slider, "Delicate Flower" will hide replies and threads which have just a few FFs, while "Asbestos Eyeballs" will not hide many (or any) replies no matter how many FFs they have received.

Authenticated: This is outdated but it's still used on Datalounge, albeit incorrectly. In the past, paid members were authenticated members, having had to provide an email address to become authenticated. They were allowed to use a redname to sign their posts, if they wanted. Non-paid members didn't have to log in with an email (they used a contribution code, a system which was phased out several years ago) and were not authenticated. These days, everyone has to have an email login and has to have a redname of some sort, even if they don't use it. Those who post with a redname are not authenticated anymore, though some older users still refer to them as such.

Culture Wars: Wikipedia is the most useful page on this, for good or ill.

EST: Elaborate Scenario Troll. A complicated term with a long and quite depressing history. The term was coined some time around 2005 for a single troll who, as the Wikipedia entry for DL once said, "deployed florid, overwrought prose to describe painstakingly elaborate situations requiring DataLoungers' consult" which were "widely believed...to be fictional." Soon after, any post describing an event that almost certainly didn't happen was called an "EST." At the time, this phenomenon of writing long, fake, detailed stories for attention was relatively uncommon, but these days the internet is awash with it. Note that in 2009, Datalounge was flooded with posts from a particularly irritating poster known as "Noodles" and his self-appointed nemesis, "Anti-Noodles," whose alleged attempt to "take down" Noodles just ended up making the situation worse. Compounding the problem was that right-wing and far-right political ESTs were being posted, too, beginning during the 2008 presidential campaign and becoming a torrent of troll posts by 2009, just as Noodles was getting out of hand. A Datalounge moderator, for reasons which were never explained, decided that the solution to the problems was to ban anyone accusing a poster of being "Noodles" or of being an "EST." The moderator, who clearly had not been paying attention, seemed to think that both Noodles and the political EST posters were victims. Thus, for a while, you could not type the initialism "EST" without getting permanently banned. People would work around this by posting something such as, "What an Exceptionally Sordid Tale this is." The Noodles situation resolved, assumedly thanks to some bans, and the EST ban did not last long, but some people to this day will still use a phrase like "Extremely Sordid Tale," as basically a 15-year-old callback.

FAQ: The Datalounge Frequently Asked Questions page. Click on the bolded topics to expand them.

FF: Flames & Freaks. The orange button at the bottom of a post/reply which is intended to act as a way to report the worst trolls. You only get 3 uses of FF per rolling 24 hours, before it's taken away for 24 hours as a "cooling down" period.

Forum Sliding: Also called "forum shifting" on DL for some reason. It's when a troll posts a bunch of essentially harmless threads but then keeps track of them, so that way, at a later date, they can call up these old harmless threads in an effort to "slide down" a thread they do not like and essentially hide it. For example, someone who doesn't want DL to discuss Trump's latest arraignment may suddenly bump a bunch of threads about Neil Patrick Harris, that are all dated from 2015, causing the Trump thread to fall down on the thread list and disappear. That's "forum sliding." Read more here.

Ignore: The ability to ignore an account or thread. The orange button at the bottom of a post/reply with a little "no" slash through the image of a person. Ignoring threads generally does not work at this time. You can ignore up to 255 accounts/people before your list maxes out. You can access your list of Ignored people and threads at the top of the screen by clicking "Ignore."

Karma: The reputation you get on DL as a poster. It's explained more in the FAQ.

Muriel: The pet name for whoever is moderating at the time. Taken from the movie Muriel's Wedding.

OP: What we call the Original Poster or the top post. Same as on other forums.

Paywall (also called Murieled): When a thread is locked down on DL so that only paying users can post. Threads can be paywalled even if the site itself is not on Primetime.

Primetime (sometimes Prime Time): When Datalounge is locked down so that only paid members can post. Datalounge called their pay-only mode "Primetime" several years ago, but these days, per the FAQ, they just call it "read only" mode "during times of high traffic." It appears they also turn on Primetime manually if they see a lot of trolls or FFs, and also during holidays, probably to help keep manual moderation to a minimum.

Profile: Officially, no one has a profile on Datalounge, but you can click on a redname and see a limited list of the posts someone has started while using their redname, along with their WW votes and a few other bits of information.

R-numbers (also R-replies, R#, and others): Replies on threads are unofficially referred to as R-numbers. You will see them in threads as [R5] or [R200] and such. To use an R-number, just type the R followed immediately (no space) with the number of the reply you want to reference. Want to reference reply #33? Type R33 and the system will automatically put the brackets around them, make them bold, and create a pop-up that will show that R33 reply if you hover over or tap it.

Redname: The user name you chose when you first logged in. If you use it on a post, it shows up in the By: line in red. You can click on this red name and see a limited profile of the posts started by this user.

Redtag: Unrelated to rednames. When someone gets permanently banned, everything that they have ever posted will be grayed out and a red tag at the bottom added, that looks like this: [ troll 6000 ] If you see a post that isn't offensive but is grayed out and has a redtag, that's because something else they posted got them banned.

Sockpuppets (or sock puppets): Multiple accounts run by a single person. These are generally used to brigade a thread or to give out multiple FFs, because of the current FF limit.

Troll: Datalounge has basically two definitions of "troll." One is the usual definition: someone who is posting inflammatory content just to cause trouble. However, especially in the early days of the forum, a "troll" was someone who was obsessed with a specific topic. Someone who posted frequently about Daphne Zuniga would be called The Daphne Zuniga Troll, for example, even if they weren't ever obnoxious about it. This was unique to Datalounge, as far as I know.

WW: Wit & Wisdom. The light blue button at the bottom of a post/reply which basically acts as an upvote. You have an unlimited number of these per day.

Ignore-Dar

Here are the basics on how to use the ignore feature to see some of the posts a specific user has written. This technique is often called "ignore-dar."

1. Put the person you want to ignore-dar on ignore.

2. Click on your "ignored" list. It's located on the top black bar next to the "no" or "ban" circle shape.

3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of your ignored list. Ignored posters are listed in chronological order. That means the most recent person you've put on ignore will be at the very bottom of the list.

4. At that point, you can probably see plenty of the posts and replies that the user has made.

5. If you don't want to leave them ignored, click the X at the top of that person's ignored entry. They will be unignored.

Big Fucking Important Note:

What you see in ignore is based entirely on recent activity in threads you have visited or have in your watch list.

You can only see the posts and replies of an ignored user if you have either watched threads they have posted in, or been to the same threads they have posted in, and on that visit only.

This means that you are not going to see everything someone has posted. 

This also means that if you have just logged in and only been to one thread, and put someone on ignore, you will only see what they have posted in that one thread you have visited so far. If you just happen to have some threads they posted in on your watch list, you'll see those, too. However, there is a very good chance you will only see their replies in that one thread.

Further, if you just happen to have only gone to one thread someone else has posted in, you will only see their replies in that one thread, even if they have posted elsewhere. 

This is why you should not pay much, if any, attention to someone who insists that a poster is a troll "because they have only posted in this thread and no others."

Say someone is really fond of talking about Martinizing, but you're sick and tired of hearing about it, so you avoid the threads. Later, the Martinizing fan posts that he eats store-brand mayonnaise straight out of the jar. You quickly put him on ignore, as any sane person would do, but you get curious. You check the ignored list and only see the one post about mayonnaise from him. You may think that means he has not posted anywhere else; however, if you'd gone to the Martinizing threads, you'd know he had posted hundreds of times, but you had been avoiding the threads on Martinizing. Therefore, you simply had not seen his hundreds of posts, because you had not been to the same threads he has.

Further, let's say you log out of the forum and then back in a few hours later. You check your ignored list before doing anything else. You scroll down and see that the ignored entry for the Martinizing fellow is completely empty. That's because you have not visited any threads yet, let alone threads where he has posted.

Another Big Fucking Important Note:

You cannot identify sockpuppets via ignore-dar. Ignore-dar only shows you some posts made from one account. Each ignored user in your list is just one specific account associated with one specific login. 

If anyone says they have identified your sockpuppets by using ignore-dar, they are either confused or lying.

Sometimes people will say that the ignored function will show everything posted by a specific IP address. That's not true, but this probably was true for troll-dar years ago, which is why they're making that mistake.

I've seen people say that they used ignore-dar and discovered "all your sockpuppets and IP addresses." That's impossible. Do not believe anyone who has told you that.

Further, some people get confused, and use ignore-dar to see that R25 was also R50, which they think means they're using sockpuppets. No, what they discovered was that one account posted both replies at R25 and R50. Ignore-dar in this case did not reveal sockpuppets.

Other Equally Important Things to Note:

* You can only ignore a maximum of 255 people. If you put someone on ignore and it won't stick, check to see that you have not maxed out the number of ignores.

* Sometimes the system takes a few minutes to update. This means you can put someone on ignore and, if you log out immediately after, the ignore will not take. They will be unignored when you return to DL.

* Sometimes the system glitches and someone is put on ignore twice. If you click the X to unignore one of them, both of them will disappear from your ignored list.

Types of Ignore-Dar Trolls 

False Accusation Trolls: These types of trolls almost deserve their own post, because they are omnipresent on Datalounge. However, the main thing you need to remember is that there are a lot of troll accounts that deliberately yet falsely accuse others of trolling. I'm bringing this up here because these trolls tend to say that ignore-dar has proven someone is a troll, even though that's not true; they're hoping that the simple act of accusing you will convince those who cannot (or will not) use ignore-dar to check for themselves.

My advice is to either ignore all accusations that are made without evidence, or use ignore-dar to confirm an accusation for yourself. 

The Accidental Ignore-Dar Troll: There are a lot of people who are giving out bad instructions on how to use ignore-dar, and as a result, there are a lot of Dataloungers accusing others of being trolls, simply because they don't know what they're doing. They aren't False Accuser Trolls, even though they are falsely accusing others; they've simply been given bad information, and have made a mistake. 

Not that long ago, I also saw a rather hilarious drama unfold where someone said they used ignore-dar and discovered another user was a racist. Unfortunately, what had actually happened was that they got user R123, an actual racist, confused with R124, who had done nothing but post a Sure, Jan gif. I thought it was funny; it was clear that none of the people actually involved thought so.

How to See Missing Posts in a Thread

When you have posts missing in a thread because you have users on ignore, there are easy ways to still see those replies.

First, please don't just post the R# of the missing post. We have a troll who does this: they have [R3] on ignore, for example, so they post nothing but "R3" (without quotation marks) in a reply, which allows them to hover over that [R3] and see the reply. This is irritating. This is troll behavior. Don't do this.

Probably the easiest method to see the missing posts from ignored users is to copy the URL of the thread and go to another browser or a private tab where you are not logged in, paste the URL, and read from there. All replies will show regardless of whether you have someone ignored or not.

The other way to see these missing replies is to go to your Ignored tab, then use CTRL-F to search for the subject line of the thread you were just in. You won't see the R# of the person who posted, but you will see their reply.

Something to note when you're using CTRL-F to search the ignored page, is that apostrophes don't render properly. For example:

If you CTRL-F and search for "can't" you won't see this entry because of the weird way the apostrophe renders.

Let's Be Careful Out There

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to talk about keeping yourself safe on Datalounge.

Datalounge is an anonymous forum, and I'm betting most of you rely on that fact to keep yourselves from dealing with the repercussions of what you've said. 

The chances of anyone doxxing you on Datalounge are probably pretty slim. Remember, everyone that we know the government name and identity of on DL is someone who told us themselves. They linked to news articles with their names in them, Facebook accounts, Change petitions, personal social media, or any number of things that identified them. As long as you don't do that yourself, you're probably good.

However, it has to be noted that we have some trolls who are very interested in getting your information, and you should try to protect yourself, at least a little.

Bottom Line: Use a VPN, and Don't Post Any Personal Information

This includes replying to any of those threads asking where you live, what your job is, where you graduated from high school or college, what your astrological sign is, did your grandmother have a strange name, or anything like this.

The person who used to post results from FaceApp (but not, to my knowledge, the person who posts ReFace results, so please don't get confused and obnoxious and accuse them of anything) once posted threads asking where people lived, and then admitted within the threads that they were using a packet sniffer to detect locations of users.

Why does this matter? Every time you interact with a website, a packet of information is sent, usually including your IP address along with other info. What this user was doing was getting replies indicating where a user lived, and then comparing them to the packets of data that were being sent to Datalounge. By doing so, they could match someone who posted "I live in Philadelphia" with a packet that came in with an IP address that resolved to Philadelphia.

It would be trivially easy to take that IP information you just got from a packet, use ignore-dar, and cross-reference that with any other personal information the Philadelphia poster happened to give out on the forum, and get a pretty decent idea of who they might be.

The person who said they were using a packet sniffer is still posting. Their threads were deleted, but Mediapolis did not ban them.

Further, most people who are up to no good don't admit it. If you can see one person skimming data on the forum, there's probably 100 of them in the background that you don't know about. You know, like cockroaches.

Also, there are a few forum members who overshare so much that, even though I don't want the information and never looked for it, I know quite a bit about their personal lives. There's no way to give an example without potentially revealing someone's information, but I will say that one person has posted so often about their past employment that someone could probably find them if they were on LinkedIn.

Just imagine what someone who has bad intent could do with that information.

Not only that, but think about what someone could do with just vague information about you, that they gleaned from the forum. Let's say that over the course of a couple of weeks, you posted that you work in finance, live in Indiana, have a husband and two dogs, and volunteer at the local food bank. One day, you jokingly post that you think George Clooney -- as a totally and completely random example -- is handsome. 

The next thing you know, someone on the forum who hates George Clooney has figured out your IP address and has started spoofing it when they log into DL. They post about how much they love puppies, and how they're going to volunteer at the food bank next weekend, and also going to Splashin' Safari this summer. They take credit for little things you've posted here and there.

Then, after they've made it look like they're you, they start posting very specific threats against public figures and certain demographics.

You won't even realize it's happening, probably, but you may end up with a visit from some people who have some concerns about hate crimes and threats they think you've said online.

Finally, and with apologies to the person I'm quoting, I'd like to mention this, which is a thought I see on the forum a lot. 

This is not actually true! There are profiles. All DL users have to sign up with an email, and everyone has to choose a username, also known as a redname. If you've ever posted with your redname, it can be clicked on and it will take you to your Datalounge profile. Here's Muriel's.

Also, everything that can be seen when using ignore-dar is, for all intents and purposes, a profile. 

Using a VPN is good, but it's not protecting you much. I am very much suggesting that you to use a VPN, and you should, but it's only giving you some protection. Bad actors using packet sniffers or other methods to get your IP address and various bits of information will be thwarted, mostly, but the people who work behind the scenes at Datalounge and Mediapolis will know who you are. 

That's why, if you're using sockpuppets to flag posts, troll, or what have you, even if you're using separate browsers with separate VPNs on each, plus throwaway email accounts, it's almost certain that any Mediapolis employee looking through the website's dashboard and statistics will figure out what you're up to.

What you need to remember is that Mediapolis knows Datalounge is mostly trolls. They're not being fooled by the trolls, they simply do not care that it is happening.

More to the point, as far as your personal information goes, if someone actually hacks into the website and gets access to that backend information, a VPN won't help you much.

Further, when you sign in, even if you use a VPN, your email address and password are not exactly protected. Wireshark provides password sniffing easily to even newbie hackers, and once someone has both your email address and password, it doesn't matter if they know your IP address or not.

Do you pay for Datalounge? When you enter your Stripe payment information on the website, it's sent via packet, just like all your other data. Hopefully it's more secure, as payments are made using Stripe's proprietary security features.

When you use Datalounge, you need to be aware that you're using it with the understanding that there are bad actors of dubious mental stability who are often looking to figure out who you are, in real life. You need to understand that a lot of information is being gathered, even if you've used a throwaway email to sign up and a VPN to log in.

This is actually true of every website, and I highly recommend everyone using the basics of internet security to protect yourself.

Trolling Me, Trolling You

 

The first and most important thing you need to know about troll detection is that, at least on Datalounge, a lot of it is personal opinion. There's no hard and fast rule you can use to identify a sockpuppet, and often no easy way to really identify a troll, either. Further, someone you consider a troll may not be considered a troll by anyone else.

Still, here are some tips, all personal experience and/or opinion. 

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Common Troll Topics:

1. Anything about "the woke" or "SJWs," i.e. "Waah, the woke broke my dick and stole all my socks!"

2. Race-bait topics of the type that were featured in Breitbart under the "black crime" tag. Similarly, threads like "When did Spring Break get so black?" and "Black People Smell" will seem like obvious troll threads to nearly anyone reading this; however, they frequently receive replies from forum members who, unfortunately, cannot easily recognize trolling.

3. "Everything is awful and we should all just kill ourselves about it."

4. "Please see all 15 threads I have posted today about horrible crimes committed against babies, animals, and baby animals."

5. Trans persons, the Sussexes, MRA topics, hating on lesbians, black actresses with opinions, autism.

6. The underwhelming threads. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

7. "I did something sexist/racist/homophobic at work, and it was unfair."

8. "Here's something some nobody on social media said, and you should be mad about it."

Sockpuppets: Again, there is no easy way to detect a sockpuppet. It's based entirely on your own observation, and because Datalounge deletes threads regularly, there's often no proof left that the trolling or sockpuppeting happened.

It's important to note that some people may have sockpuppets for innocent, or at least non-nefarious, reasons. Maybe someone is just really fond of "Knight Rider" and has a few different accounts they use to get the discussion going. That's really not trolling; or, more accurately, it's "trolling" in the Datalounge-specific colloquial sense. Years ago, anyone who had a rather odd obsession or knowledge set and who posted about it a lot was called a "troll," and not in a negative way. These days, we have both regular internet trolls and a few Datalounge "trolls."

Another example of a non-harmful sockpuppet would be someone who has a specific character they play as part of the "collaborative fiction" aspect of the board, and they don't do anything particularly harmful with it. Again, this is a matter of opinion. Do they like to post about a certain Z-list actor a lot, and keep it to one thread? Or do they post constantly about a celebrity they hate, with multiple threads a day and while using a series of accounts?

Someone might want to have one account for discussion and a second one for the porn threads, or one for religious topics and one for everything else. Maybe they have one login at work and one at home.

Also, it bears mentioning that sometimes people are just jerks and not truly trolls. Sometimes someone who doubles down, triples down, quadruples down on a mistake and starts shouting all manner of insults is just embarrassed and kind of pathetic, rather than a troll.

Troll Examples:

The following are a few examples that I personally have run into on Datalounge, but ultimately, the verdict on whether someone is a troll and/or sockpuppet or not is going to be your opinion, rather than something you can factually prove.

- In the middle of a conversation, someone posts with one account, then replies with a different account.

- Similar to the above: In one instance, someone mentioned they couldn't link to the Miami Herald, apparently for technical reasons. I suggested they link to a Tweet with the article in it instead. For unexplained reasons, someone jumped into the conversation, throwing around insults at both of us. No one responded, and I put them on ignore. About 15 minutes later, a second person showed up, saying the same nasty things about everyone. I ignored them. Then a third person, then a fourth person, all doing the same thing. My judgement in this instance was that all four were the same person using multiple accounts, trying to get attention, upset because no one had responded. However, this is a good example of something that looks like a troll, but cannot be proven. You're using judgement in this case to decide.

- Sussex Trolls use multiple accounts regularly, often using one to post slurs, and secondary accounts to defend the slurs. In one case, someone was outed as using sockpuppets because they kept spelling Harry's name as "Herry" with every account they had. 

- One of our more notorious trolls would come up with very specific phrases containing multiple slurs. He was identified, in fact, because he used to post one specific slur all over the internet: "cracker breeder goyim," which appeared on Reddit, Queerty, JoeMyGod, Towleroad, DListed, the IMDb boards, various websites that used Disqus for comments, Facebook, and of course, Datalounge. This was the troll's favorite phrase about five years ago, and over time, his replies have been deleted, for obvious reasons. However, he continues to invent new slur phrases and use them constantly with all of his accounts, making it easy to identify his sockpuppets.

- If a bunch of threads all on the exact same topic get posted and/or bumped at the same time, it could very likely be sockpuppets.

- A couple of years ago, an angry troll spammed Datalounge with about 50 threads about poop posted over the course of maybe five minutes total. Each of the threads was started by a separate account, making it nearly impossible to ignore them all. This was the first real evidence we had that there was a single person behind dozens of sockpuppet accounts. I kept several of those accounts on ignore, including one account with a redname that they (probably mistakenly) used. None of these sockpuppets were banned, and they're still being used. Because the threads were deleted, there's no way to prove anything.

- Someone trolls at length until they finally say something they can't troll their way out of. They disappear, and within moments, a second person shows up to start making the same arguments as the first person did. Congratulations, you just spotted someone using sockpuppets.

- Posting topics that are meant to give trolls a place to troll. This is often called "trollbait." Someone will post a perfectly good article from a real, verified news source, but the first few responses will be troll responses. Say someone posts an article from WaPo about the increase in hurricanes in recent years, but you notice that within one or two minutes at most, another person has replied with fake news sources or rants and raves about how climate change isn't real. You've probably run into a case of one person being both the OP of the thread and the sockpuppets who use the topic as a chance to spread misinformation. 

- Playing both sides. Here's someone who used slurs, and then later with the same account, complained about the use of those same slurs.

Trolls Use Distractions:

The goal of a lot of trolls is simply to disrupt. They don't just want to irritate people, they want their threads to gain prominence while others' threads languish or are ignored. Some examples:

- Pretending to make mistakes or get confused. This is a common one on Datalounge. I cannot count the number of times I have replied to someone who I thought was simply mistaken, only to find out they had been lying and hoping that someone would respond so they could try to start a flamewar, or lying about something that they hoped no one would bother to correct.  

- Falsely claiming there's already a thread, or that the link in the OP doesn't work, or that something has been debunked when it hasn't been. This is related to fake "mistakes" or "confusion," really. If someone says "Already a thread" but doesn't link to it or at least give the subject line, look for yourself. You'll find a lot of these claims are lies.

- Deliberately killing a new thread before it can get started. If someone shows up very quickly in a thread, starts hurling insults that don't seem to make much sense, and the thread suddenly goes gray, you can bet that the insult-hurler is a troll who has used sockpuppets to FF the thread to get rid of it.

- If you make a typo or a mistake, and they pounce on it with excessive insults while ignoring the content of your comment.

- Pretending you accused them of something you never did.

- Alternately, accusing you of something that you hadn't done. Frequently, they will accuse you of something no one has actually done.

- Claiming that something specific was not posted, written, or said, when it's easily available and right there for all to read.

- Posting repeat topics. You'll find that a lot of people do nothing but post things that have already been posted before, and which have active threads.

Karma Farming:

As mentioned, DL uses a "karma" system to determine who can and can't post or moderate (i.e. WW or FF) a user or thread. It's explained in the FAQ under "Why can't I post?" 

Good "karma" is essential for a troll to be able to troll. Because of this, they do what is often called "mining for karma" or "karma farming," i.e. posting topics and replies designed to get them WWs which will increase their karma.

This is often why we have the same topics posted repeatedly: 1980s night-time soaps, Golden Girls, historical unsolved cases, Karen Carpenter, Lucille Ball, budgets, retirement, what are you having for dinner, etc. Also, if a new topic takes off, like the topic of Gwyneth Paltrow recently, you will see people taking single comments or observations from Paltrow threads and making new threads out of them, for several days, until the topic dies down.

That's not to say any thread on these topics is a troll thread. Again, this is going to involve judgement on your part. However, if you see someone posting repeatedly about The Golden Girls who is also posting obvious troll comments, you've probably found someone who is hoping to get enough WWs from Golden Girls comments that it will offset FFs they get from trolling.

This is hardly an exhaustive list. I don't want an exhaustive list, do you? No. Nobody does.

Trolling comes and goes in waves, dependent on whether it's Primetime, or whether the one guy who checks in on Datalounge once a month has decided to ban a troll or two, and that troll needs to wait the two weeks before they can post. That said, they mostly seem to just pay to troll now, which doesn't bode well for the forum.

Zen and the Art of Datalounge Maintenance

There are a few things I would suggest that could make Datalounge a better, more functional forum. I suspect it's dysfunctional on purpose, and I also suspect a long-banned former regular once accidentally hit upon why, which is why they're always and forever banned, but more than that I will not say.

Even though I doubt this will accomplish anything, I don't like complaining about problems without having some solutions, so I have a few suggestions that might improve the Datalounge experience for the users. These are all personal opinions and nothing more than that.

1. Give users more FFs. Moderators have said that we need to FF trolls to hell, so give us the ability to actually do that.

2. Ban slurs and a small list of specific keywords. Datalounge used to have a few banned words, and the word "Edwin" is currently banned, so we know it's possible. Bring it back.

3. Fix the Ignore Thread feature.

4. Let us ignore more accounts. If you're going to let trolls have 100 sockpuppet accounts each, then give us the ability to ignore them.

5. Actually ban links to troll websites. You've banned links to TikTok, that means you can ban other links, too. You tried to ban links to two websites, but for inexplicable reasons, the links still work; all you did was replace a poster's text with autotext. That's not a ban. That's just silly.

6. Ban the worst of the worst, and keep them banned. You know who the worst trolls are. You ban the troll known as "Mrs Patrick Campbell" every time you realize they're back on the forum, so you can do the same for the two or three others who are just as bad. 

7. Bring back trolldar, or at least some easy-to-use form of troll detection.

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As of right now, 90% of the forum's content is right-wing propaganda and trolling, or posts from one of two trolls: either the catfishing enthusiast who also wants to tell us what he ate at McDonald's, or the straight woman with a genuine affliction, who only posts on DL out of spite and because she hates gays. 

Attempts to add more variety of content and new topics generally fail. Mainly, this is because trolls have no interest in anything that they did not post themselves. These trolls rely on sockpuppet accounts to control the board. They know that the board uses the "karma" system, so they are constantly mining for karma, and as such will primarily only pay attention to their own posts; participation alone seems to generate some karma, and of course they WW themselves, which gets them more board karma.

This is why we are awash with threads that contain short two- or three-sentence descriptions of celebrities, movies, or shows, where you are then asked what you think about said celebrity, movie, or show. This is why we always have threads about the same 20 topics, and very little else. This is why someone will post repeatedly about their alleged personal woes. They post what they know from experience will get them replies, which are reflected in their karma.

Further, to maintain control of the board, these trolls will sometimes FF a thread that is not their own, often just enough so that it no longer gets bumped to the top of the main page. The main page is automatically sorted by activity, so posts with recent comments are at the top. Give a thread about four or five FFs and the auto-moderation system will no longer track that thread's activity. The thread will no longer get bumped no matter how many replies it gets, and it'll drop to the bottom of the thread list, where it essentially disappears. 

There's no reason why the content on Datalounge should be entirely controlled by bad actors and trolls.