Trolltalk
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Trolltalk (also known as 20721) is a hidden story ID of the online news discussion forum Slashdot, where Slashdot trolls used to converse amongst themselves, sometimes demonstrating new trolling techniques, bragging about successful trolling and insulting each other. Trolltalk is the oldest active thread on Slashdot, and with several thousand posts at any given time it would have the highest post count on the site if not for the periodic database cleanup purging the oldest posts.
The current trolltalk was predated by an earlier thread with the textual SID "trolltalk". It was created in 2000, when, due to a bug, SlashCode allowed arbitrary alphanumeric SIDs. There were several other custom SIDs created during this time as well, such as "sid=2dollarcrackho", "sid=k223320inchfan" and "sid=10gramspoppylatex". When Slashdot was upgraded to SlashCode 2.0 the bug was fixed but there was a short-lived new feature called "user-created discussions" which featured numeric SIDs. Soon thereafter new trolltalks were created such as 20721, 31337 and 20384. With the exception of 20721 they have all been deleted or disabled by the Slashdot editors over the years. The closure of 31337 occurred on September 15, 2004 as a result of an automated trojan horse that was advertising compromised IP addresses via the SID.
Following the changes in Slashdot code intended to make trolling harder by banning users for as little as one negative moderation, the discussion has become highly variable. Between periodic attacks on various forums outside of Slashdot, discussion degenerates into dating tips, re-hashes of racist jokes and fanboy arguments. The trolltalk community used to exert significant pressure on Slashdot by creating huge threads where people would argue irrelevant and deliberately incorrect points, but this is no longer so. Although trolling on Slashdot is still an occasional pastime, much of the activity concerns easier targets, usually with a more naive userbase and less sophisticated (or absent) comment moderation system. The goal is often total destruction of a target forum/community via automated crapflooding, exploitation of security flaws and harassment of the site operators, usually in the most shocking and comedic fashion possible.
Slashdot's moderation system is little used on trolltalk, since the community is relatively small and obscure, and its users rarely receive mod points. Due to this and the fact that few "normal" Slashdot users visit the SID it is essentially a zone without rules. Often, members of the community who are angry at having been insulted or losing an argument (or are simply bored) will use automated scripts to flood trolltalk with random messages for days or weeks, making any discussion impossible. Crapfloods are a regular occurrence and are considered a part of trolltalk culture, although they frequently annoy users who wish to chat.
Trolltalk archive
Since Slashdot removes the oldest comments from user-created SIDs, an archive has been created. Originally posts were manually imported from saved trolltalk pages sent by an anonymous contributor and subsequently by writing an automated script to extract the contents of trolltalk. The archive is database-driven and has advanced search capabilities.
Meta publication
The Slashdot journal of user "TrollBack" (the name is an allusion to "Slashback") contains a review of featured trolls over the past time period (usually a calendar month). TrollBack has been defunct since October 2004.
