Looks like it has become a full time job, just dealing with the trolls.
How bout the newest one, Juan Diego?
I've run a number of large forums and in my experience it is virtually never troll
s but rather one guy or occasionally a guy and his buddy.
Most forum troublemakers fall into one of a few categories.
First type is a low skill-level person who just spams forums with nonsense posts, floods forums with a large number of threads and/or registers several usernames. Typically an immature person, usually young.
Type two is not as obvious in trying to create problems. His posts will disturb a forum and rile people up without being obvious. This person is typically more intelligent than type one and often not as young.
Type three...this person straight up attacks a forum looking to exploit vulnerabilities, either by brute force attacks/dos/ddos, sql injection/cross site scripting to obtain control, assume established forum identities or cause destruction of database(s) or files.
All three types typically just do it for fun. Types 1 & 2 do it mostly for entertainment whereas type 3 typically sees it as a game/challenge or has a grudge against the site.
The problem is that you can't really stop them if the person knows what they're doing. If they connect via a proxy they can change their IP address at will and as such can just keep registering new user accounts. The only real way to stop it is to set registration to manual approval which for a larger forum is a real headache and if the person registers from a mainstream email domain and a believable screen name you can't tell real from fake. If you get to a point where you suspend all new registrations the person has essentially won because they've caused you to shut down registrations.
Cheryl has blocked most of the throw away mail domains, but if the person spends a few extra minutes to register a yahoo, gmail etc they can still register...and new throw away domains popup all the time.
My theory is that we have one tool registering all these usernames fitting the type 1/2 profiles suggesting the person isn't terribly intelligent or technically savvy, however the most recent throw away domain used was devnullmail.com. That in itself doesn't mean anything, however the use of that specific domain means that there is a chance the person has at least a basic programming or technical background as /dev/null symbolizes "nothing" in programming/systems administration. If you wanted the output of something to get trashed or go nowhere you would point it to /dev/null....
