Peripatetic Posting

Well my challenge entry for the LOTR Community January Challenge finally went up today, so I've posted it on various websites, as usual, for bumpage.

It's great fun to have a story in these challenges, particularly when friendly readers pat you on the back for it. They Might Be Giants is doing so well, other blog-reading sites have already picked it up. In some ways, it's a bit scary because I like to be in control of what's going on with my stuff. However, since it gives me the bumpage I crave, I can't complain.

It occured to me that posting stuff praising other people instead of simply pushing my own stuff adds as much to my bumpage as anything else, so I've started a new module on my Squidoo lens, Fanfiction Stories, News and Views, to promote great fanfic. Since my usual interest is Tolkien-based stories, I've added a link to the winner of Oct-Nov's Wicked Things Challenge on A Long Expected Contest, Oglat The Great.

I'll be adding more as time goes by, but my goodness, what a great crop of stories these sites attract.

Speaking of which, I'm waiting for the last entry to the Archives of Excellence January Writing Challenge, Before the Beginning, and when that's in, I'll post the polls so people can vote for the winner. It's always good to contact the winner to let them know they've won. Imagining their glee as they learn that they're a winner always makes me smile.

Which means more updating as I add the links and whatnots to the Archives. A woman's work is never done. Well, mine ain't!

King of the Hill

http://www.lotrfanshop.com/lotrshop/sideshowexcl.asp, with alteration by me.

Back when my troll problem was actually affecting me, I joined Halt Abuse. They offer emotional support and commonsense advice to people suffering from cyberbullying. Well something came up recently that reminded me of an incident that happened about two years ago.

This girl, Shannara, used to come to chat on my forum, and on one occasion she came to complain that she was being slandered and blamed for something she didn't do. Basically, her account had been hacked by trolls who guessed her password, and they went and posted obscenities on another forum in her name. I believed her at the time, and since my natural bias is to side with the underdog, I championed her cause. I permitted her to post on my forum, and told her to quit trying to convince the mod of the trolled forum to believe she was innocent.  

Well we chatted amiably enough for a while, then one day she sent me a private message in which she complained that she was being harassed on another forum, and taunted by the trolls who had accessed her old account. This is roughly what happened:

"They keep changing their pennames to confuse me when I go to fight with them," she declared.

"Why do you fight with them?" I asked. "That's what they want. It's like when we were kids and someone would grab your hat or bag and hold it just out of reach. I learned to walk away and not try to get it back off them. Sooner or later, they'd get bored and drop it, then I'd go and pick it up. When I stopped giving them the frantic reaction they craved, they quit teasing me because I gave them no entertainment."

"But they're saying stuff about me!" she complained. "And people are believing them."

"What sort of people believe people who hack other people's accounts, then brag about it?" I asked. "What does it mean if liars and idiots believe bad things about you? If you argue back, more idiots and liars will believe bad things about you. It'll fizzle out if you stop reacting to their baiting."

"It's easy for you to say," she argued, "you're not in this situation."

"I've been bullied all my life," I replied. "I'm always in that situation, but I've learned how to deal with it. The number one thing to remember is to refuse to give them the satisfaction of getting an reaction. If you just carry on like nothing's wrong, they'll give up, it'll fizzle out and be forgotten. Why do you worry about idiots not believing or respecting you? An idiot's opinion is worthless, so don't worry about what they think."

She conceded I was right, then went away. I heard little from her after that, but it came to my attention that she was associating with a group of trolls who went on to harass me for about two years. She never joined in with their abuse of myself, but she did egg on and take part in "spam raids" on other forums. She's a young mother in her twenties.

Photo by kjarrett on Flickr

As I've said before, trolls are of all ages and all walks of life. This girl is a troll. Well, she was. I think she's quit it now. The point is, I don't think trolls have a right to complain about harassment, particularly when they're in the middle of arguing on the forums they claim they're being harassed on and recruiting others to join them in their struggle to become Head Shrew, or whatever they're aiming for.

They're so flippin' manipulative they can draw other people into their arguments with others by squealing for sympathy, but my advice is to call it what it is and tell them off if they try to recruit you to help them drive another troll off the message board or forum where the alleged abuse is taking place. It ain't harassment if it's equal and going both ways. It is when it's one person being stalked or mobbed, and trying to ignore it.

Never allow yourself to be drawn into taking sides in someone else's arguments, or their problem will become your problem, and the whole thing will get out of control.

How To Cope With Trolls

I know more about internet trolls than a lot of people who have written about them because I've been trolled and stalked myself. Now I'm exploiting them for personal gain.

This is what I've learned.

Who are these people?

Probably someone you know. If not, it's someone you met online. They come from all age groups and walks of life and have one thing in common: they love to argue and trash other people; and get a thrill when they either get a reaction or cause them to abandon the site they use. The vast majority are teenage loners. They don't see others as being people in the same way they are. That's what permits them to add mocking captions to gory pictures of a car crash victim, joke about it, then recruit other people to phone the family and pretend to be her ghost, among other things. When the tables are turned, all Hell breaks loose because they don't like that kind of thing coming their way.

How do they operate?

The parasite: they start arguments that go on for days, weeks, months or even years. A smart, manipulative troll who comes across as urbane and sophisticated may be hard to recognise as being one because he's subtle in the way he abuses, but if he keeps an old argument going on and on, he's a troll. This type is obsessive and likes to maintain a connection, and often insists that the target is constantly watching them. Trolling and stalking by this type can go on for years, and they often recruit others to join in the abuse of their target.

The carpet-bomber: trolls like to bombard interactive internet services with ugly or indecent images or statements, or use internet memes such as "Longcat is long" repeated over and over again to overwhelm a forum or message board and make it unreadable – and unusable. The idea is to shut the website, message board or forum down. Trolling by this type doesn't tend to last because they do it for the “lulz,” or laughs at other people's expense. Incidents tend to last for an hour or so, then tail off and stop when they and their cohorts have been banned. They tend to come in groups, and the term of “spamming,” or bombardment, tends to last for a month or two. If it goes on for longer, with clusters of spamming “raids” going on for days at a time, then stopping, it's because they've been recruited by a parasite.

The slimer: They work by repeatedly posting exaggerated complaints or negative statements (“wank”) about their targets on multiple sites to ruin their reputations. This usually attracts other trolls, who are then recruited to join in the abuse. A mob mentality results, and they work to isolate the target by recruiting his or her associates. The idea is to conquer or “PWN” the target by forcing them to leave the website in question. Some trolls have even forced their victims off the internet altogether.

Trolls don't tend to remain in the categories assigned to them. They often adopt each other's tactics and work together to create a community dedicated to making someone's life a misery. Sociable trolls may complicate matters by making friends with non-trolls. When they're friends with your friends (it happened to me), online life can become very complicated.

How to deal with it

If you're being trolled or cyberbullied, the best thing to do is ignore it and shut it out as well as you can, then build an online network of friends whose positivity can bury the trolls' abuse and render it ineffective. My Suite 101 article on cyberabuse, Stop Troll Trouble, has comprehensive advice on what to do to protect yourself and your computer from them.

Taking the following advice should enable you to continue your online experience when targeted by trolls.

Keep quiet: do not complain about them where they can see it or they'll see it as proof that you're giving them the attention they crave. If you simply must complain about them on your blog, set that post to private or friends-only. Do not let your friends or posters on your forum or message board talk about them unless those posts are hidden from public view. Where there are trolls there's no freedom of speech for their targets.

Never read the posts they make and don't even think about reading their blogs. Curiosity is natural, but if they can get you to pay attention to them in any way, they've won. Avoid all contact with them. Never reply to posts they've made or correspond openly with their non-troll friends. Keep away from them, and keep them out!

Get support: be very careful how you do this. Building and maintaining relationships with friendly people is the key, but for Heaven's sake don't let them get involved with your problem. What I'm advocating here is creating an ever-increasing network of friends whose camaraderie drowns the trolls' efforts to spoil your online experience. Attempting to get your friends to troll the trolls will either backfire or make a bad thing much, much worse.

Create a plethora of positive posts. My fanfiction awards program has greatly increased my online profile and added to my popularity. The result is, few people takes the trolls' comments seriously. Commenting favourably on people's blogs and building networks of associates with shared interests will quickly bury negative information about you on the internet.

Other options

Getting them to stop by any other means is an uphill struggle and chances are, you will lose.

Reputation management companies may claim to be able to remove negative content, but when they come across a statement made by “an opinionated person” there's no chance they'll take it on; they usually advise that attempting to do so will make matters worse.

Reporting them to the authorities is only truly effective if there is an element of threat involved, and even that must be credible. Messages beginning with "I will rip out your intestines..." won't be taken seriously because they are an internet meme and not a genuine threat. However, reporting such incidents to the IC3 Internet Crime Complaint Center creates a log that can be used to prosecute a troll or cyberstalker for federal offences if the case goes to a civil court - provided that you win.

Leave the site – or the internet: if the abuse is severe and you've got no reason to remain, you might as well leave. Setting up a new account and avoiding the websites frequented by the trolls may allow you to continue online life, but be careful not to provide any clues that could identify you to the trolls, or connect you to your old account. This is a last resort – the minute you leave, they've won, and experience the thrill of having conquered you. Then they go off and do it again to someone else.

Trolls and cyberstalkers can make online life a misery for their targets, but by being positive, sensible, and building relationships with like-minded people, it's possible to mitigate or even overwhelm their efforts to upset and offend.

Also posted on Wikio and Bloglines.

Bogged down in blogging

I've been so busy with bumpage and all, I've completely neglected my stories! I used to laugh at those friends of mine who had three, four or more stories on the go, but that's exactly where I'm at. How did it happen?

As a rule, I'm one of those people who likes to do one thing at a time and not start anything new until I'm finished. As a rule. The fact is, I've got a Harry Potter 'what happened next' story, Malfoy Redux, on hiatus and haven't even started on the edits so kindly provided by my friends for my Silmarillion gapfiller Mahtan's Apprentice. 

Added to that, I'm in the middle of a new story for the LOTR Community Challenges "Say it in a letter" challenge. I know! But it was only meant to take a couple of hours to knock out and post to Dreamflower, who is one of the mods. A kinder and more helpful person I have yet to meet, bless her. I do take my writing seriously; it's just that, when inspiration strikes, you keep on typing till all the words are out. To be honest, I'm a bit stuck on it. I know what I'm aiming for, it's getting the right words down that's stumping me. Well, it'll have to wait. It's not due till 25th February, anyway. At least my Teitho one is out.

What gives? Well, it's not just the bumpage. The fact is, I like to write, and I like to write so much that writing for various RL things such as internet trends has taken over. I didn't mean it to happen, honestly, but it just did.

Pure bumpage can be effected using Delicious, Netvibes, and Stumbleupon. Basically, it's permitted spamming, up to a point. Digg won't let you get away with it. They've banned posts about fanhistory wiki so my fanhistory wiki: WendWriter article doesn't get the boost it needs to raise it up the search results ranks. I sneaked Fanlore in there, so that's showing. 

So...

Bloglines will let you simply add feeds from the various websites you subscribe to your account. I copy and paste my Wikio articles to my blog there too, for bumpage purposes. Wikio, however, demands actual content. You can either write your own article, as I did, or add one from somewhere else. Just don't pretend it's yours, though. So, to get my Wikio thing to work, I had to write an actual article. There, for bumpage, I added links to my online activities, wikis, etc. It worked quite well, but only updating and adding to that site will continue the good bumpage work being done there. 

Well, during the course of my research, I discovered Squidoo. It's a great thing, that, but only the most linked ones get on to the search results page, so I've had to link it to my bumpage sites Delicious and Netvibes. I believe I Dugg it and added it to Bloglines. Adding the widgets to Squidoo took a fair amount of time, and it was so much fun to play with...! I had a bit of trouble with it because I'd given it too high a rating. By changing the rating, I've made it searchable. It was given an R for safety, but that got it listed with the porno sites and whatnot! Most of the stuff I've got on there is family-friendly. There are some scenes of violence in the videos I've linked and some of the websites I post on accept adult content, but there are no direct links to anything that would give Granny a heart attack.

Then I remembered I had an account on Suite 101 which I had never activated. I used it for commenting, and had left comments that I would, with hindsight, not have made if I'd realised I was going to end up being quoted here, there and everywhere. Yeah... other websites and blogs have linked to my LJ and other stuff, and basically, if I want to be taken seriously as a writer, I need to bury all the negative stuff. That's really what the bumpage is for: to hide stupid comments made in the heat of the moment because I got all worked up about something. 

Well I signed up as a contributing writer, and go by Wendy C- there, but they will emphatically not let me use it for bumpage. I can't write in this chatty, familiar style, either. Dang! It's how I like to write! It feels natural to write this way. But no, they want articles that are all professional and polished, with few links and a completely objective tone. I could get all pouty and point to the writers who have broken those rules, but the response would probably be, "Why do you want to write badly so badly?" I'd lose, so there's no point in arguing.

The result of all my Wikio wibblings is a series of articles that got me accepted onto a site where the standards are high and there's a hope of receiving a share of the advertising revenue. That's a good enough reason to get all distracted, isn't it? 

I've got nine more articles to write in the next three months. Let's hope I don't get distracted by fanfiction!

Wacky Wikis

Am I wrong about this, or is it an abuse of the wiki ethos to make a wiki just for yourself? Surely to goodness you can add to an existing one or something. I don't get it. Do these people not understand what wikis are? This is what a wiki is:

From Wikis: A Help or A Hindrance?

The uses and abuses of an internet resource, by Wendy C-

According to techterms.com, “A wiki is a Web site that allows users to add and update content on the site using their own Web browser. This is made possible by Wiki software that runs on the Web server. Wikis end up being created mainly by a collaborative effort of the site visitors. A great example of a large wiki is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia in many languages that anyone can edit. The term 'wiki' comes from the Hawaiian phrase, 'wiki wiki,' which means 'super fast.'”

The exponential growth of a website constantly edited and added to by increasing numbers of contributors would certainly be super fast.

They work by permitting access to everyone to edit the content, write new articles and upload information. Some wikis demand that would-be editors log in first, while others are more relaxed in their approach. On Wikipedia, those who wish to edit an article are urged to log in. Failure to do so results in their IP (internet service provider) address being recorded publicly in the page's edit history. This makes it possible to ban people who abuse the system by trolling.

So why the devil are people making ones about themselves? Anyone can edit them, so yeah, there's the networking potential, but isn't that best applied to a blog or a personal website?

Wikis dedicated to special interest groups and laid out like encyclopedias are very useful for bumpage and information. Biographies, descriptions of websites and their histories, area-specific jargon and other items can be added to by people wishing to promote themselves and their activities in, say, fandom, as I do. I personally added stuff about myself and my websites Archives of Excellence and The Golden Quill Awards to the wikis Fan History Wiki, Fanlore, and Fanfiction Wikia. I linked the whole lot to my Netvibes account, which also has links to online fandom resources. I'm always looking to add more.

The fact that other people share my interest in fanfiction and the sources thereof, to wit, the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, makes it much more likely that we can work together for our mutual benefit in terms of providing information and promoting each other's activities than if I simply made a WendWriter wiki and expected other people to cram it with articles about how great they think I am, or whatever. That's not what they're for! My blogs on LiveJournal and my fanfiction review boards are for that! Just kiddin'.

The point is, while it's possible to make your own wiki, perhaps it's best to ask whether or not a collaborative site that anyone can edit is the best use of the platform. It's not like you're committing a crime, but permitting a self-glorifying wiki to be buried under others of the same kind is probably the last thing the owners want.

New Moves

I've been blogging away on other sites, working to promote my fandom and other online activities. I must confess I've found Delicious, Digg, NetVibes, Squidoo and StumbleUpon very handy for bumpage purposes. Bloglines and Wikio have given me fantastic opportunities to raise my websites' search engine results to the front page in every case.

But there's trouble in paradise. You see, the things I've been doing for the old blatant self-promotion thing is basically an abuse of the system. Hands up, I admit it, I knew what I was doing at the time, but I didn't think I'd be... well... caught. Digg has been flagged about the fandom wikis I tried to insinuate into their news feed. The trouble is, that's all they've got: news articles, pictures or videos, which rather narrows the options for where to post stuff about blogs or articles that basically aren't news. A shameless self-promotion section would be the answer, but that's basically spam - or is it? Blogs and self-owned wikis, Squidoo and sites like that are usually used for those purposes...

Dang! I want to get the word out about my stuff without getting into trouble for it! Suggestions are welcome.