The Trailer Park

The Trailer Park is a spill over area of this site where all things flaming reside. While humour, passion and vigorous debate can be part of a lively discussion, in all electronic forums, some posts are intentionally designed to provoke a hostile reaction in the readers and start a flame war, or are simply derogatory insults about a specific person or group of people, and have no intellectual value.

On this site, when a post is deemed to be a flame or flame bait, it is transferred to the Trailer Park. It can still be replied to, but the ensuing thread will remain in the Trailer Park with a link from the original discussion. This allows the people not wishing to participate in the flame war to simply ignore this content.

If a participant is a troll, and consistently insults others or attempts to provoke flame wars, then they may be restricted to only participating within the Trailer Park. (The initial restriction will be for a period of one week).

Definitions

[Source: The Jargon Dictionary http://info.astrian.net/jargon/]

Flame Bait
An inflammatory posting intended to provoke a flame war, or one that invites flames in reply.

Flame [at MIT, orig. from the phrase 'flaming asshole']
1. vi. To post a message intended to insult and provoke.
2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people.
4. n. An instance of flaming.

The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.

Flame War
n. [common] (var. 'flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum.

Troll
n. An individual who regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll."

The use of 'troll' is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a follow-up to troll postings.

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