(A Net Ethology / A Troll's Confection)

 When a person's sanity is at balance,
 when human passion is raging,
 no etiquette must get in the way.
     —Xah Lee, 2001.

The internet has changed society deeply. It has indirectly changed nations, catapulted sciences, deeply imbued the daily lives of men, and as well affected writings and have created a culture one of a kind, among which is FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), Netiquette, and Trolling. Netiquette refers to Net Etiquette. It is the implicit rules in online communities, widely purveyed in the early days of internet (pre-1997) but faded quietly with the mainstreaming of internet. Troll roughly refers to someone who posts a message that solicit outwardly or indirectly a huge usually chaotic following. In these pages, are collected essays on these phenomena.

I as a troll is rather special because i tend to put a final say on things, in contrast with one-liner trolls i myself despise. (In a sense i'm an anti-troll, untroll, or an atrocious atroll.) At first i balked at being branded a troll. Now i revel it. I as a troll is rather recent, beginning and getting worse about in 1998. I have been using online forums since 1990. Perhaps one day i'll write “how i became a troll”. It is bound to be a tragedy. 
—Xah Lee, 2002.

I'll find a day to massacre them all, And raze their faction and their family… 
    —William Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus

This page is a index of tutorials and essays related to computing and its people. There are over 1 thousand articles. Use the search box at top to find what you are looking for.

The Linux folks have their penguin and the BSDers their daemon. Perl's got a camel, FSF fans have their gnu and OSI's got an open-source logo. What we haven't had, historically, is an emblem that represents the entire hacker community of which all these groups are parts. This is a proposal that we adopt one — the glider pattern from the Game of Life.

About half the hackers this idea was alpha-tested on instantaneously said "Wow! Cool!" without needing any further explanation. If you don't know what a glider is, or why it would make a good emblem, or if you're dubious about having an emblem at all, read the FAQs page.

I first proposed this emblem in October 2003. It has since entered fairly widespread use, as you can see by the number of international translations over on the left. Not universal, because many hackers object on principle to the idea of having an emblem at all, but it appears to be a successful meme.

A nice search engine for YC Hacker News