[techtalk] Stupid Question: Troll?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 06:10:22PM -0400 or thereabouts, wny-tc at juno.com wrote:
> OK.  I never claimed to be a computer "expert", but "trolls" live under
> bridges in my vocabulary (in childrens books mostly) or I "troll" from
> the back of the boat with suitable tackle and bait...
> 
> "Troll" in this recent thread is apparently GeekSpeek of some sort, but
> for what?

For geek speak, the canonical reference is the Jargon File: 

http://tuxedo.org/jargon/
http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/troll.html

I first met it in the sense of old-timers making deliberately wrong
comments and new people falling for it. These days, it's used to mean
"causing trouble". 

What -really- irritates me is people calling about "trolling Usenet",
"trolling the channel" (on IRC) when in fact they mean "trawl" and
mean they're going through a large batch of stuff looking for something
useful. It's not the same, but people apparently think that troll and
trawl mean the same thing. Trawling through bug reports, for example. 
Trolling through bug reports would mean something quite different.. :) 
(And I've seen a few trolling bug reports, yes.)

Telsa