The Definitive Fan #9 – The Forum Troll
Welcome to The Definitive Fan – The online guide from PowerPlayGoal.com to the types of fans who you’re likely to meet (or not meet) at a hockey game.
Most of these fans truly love the game, and some just have a passing interest, while others seemingly exist only to annoy others…
Fan Type #9 – The Forum Troll
Not quite what we had in mind, but… yeah
Bio:
Some people really do have a lot of time on their hands. This pathetic excuse of a fan may hate any particular team so much that they will go right out of their way to infuriate the fans of said team via a certain means on the internet, which as this fan type’s name suggests is a forum – particularly an unofficial, fan-made one for a certain team.
They will register an account, usually going with a name like “A REAL hockey fan” or “*insert team name here* suck”, and once logged in they will look for a section of the board, the one that attracts the most attention, namely discussions related to the team in question. They’ll then start a thread, filling their post with ludicrous “facts” as to why the team is a joke, why they shouldn’t exist, why their fans are all fake, why the team will be folding soon, etc., and if they are intelligent enough to make up a scenario of their own, they will claim that they’ve been to one of the team’s home games, pointing out things that are apparently wrong with the team and arena like the “fake fans” in attendance, and eventually they will finish their post. As with most typical forum trolls, they will log off and never return to their account again.
But the Forum Troll doesn’t stop there: they will sit and watch as people reply with angry or sarcastic comments, and posts saying “Please don’t feed the troll”. Forum Complainers will respond with whining about how it’s all true, regardless of how stupid and illogical the original post is. The thread will either go on for a while before it fades away in favour of other, more relevant threads related to the hockey team, or an admin will lock and/or remove it straightaway – the latter is likely to, ironically, annoy the troll, whose account will be banned and IP address blocked.
Characteristics:
How are we supposed to know what they look like behind the keyboard? They are more than likely to be male. As their name suggests they could have hideous faces and pointy ears, but we don’t know for sure…
Favourite Team:
In this case it should be their Favourite Team To Pick On. They are more likely to antagonise fans of the expansion era Sunbelt NHL franchises.
Other:
Admins usually manage to identify their IP addresses as being either from the more Northern States or from Canada. Go figure.
I’m Wildwing64, and this is the Definitive Fan.
(Credit to this guy for the photo)