[J m HofMarN]

Hey, I'd be glad to have an impartial observer to contribute. For starters, tell me what you think of this. It's the first little article I've done for the history.

Attack of the Hannibal

Hannibal was the uber-troll, the first true troll the Chefelf.com forums had dealt with. It shouldn’t have been a surprise in retrospect considering the explosion in popularity of the Star Wars forums. Once a forum gets popular, there will be trolls. Hannibal followed a classic troll pattern in that he was not obvious at first. His first threads are actually normal in comparison to his later work, though the first one he posted did showcase his future fascination with images.

The trolling tendencies appeared when he began to, as the noted Prequelist scholar Jariten put it, “prove his point with endless, tedious copy and pastes of other peoples’ ideas and opinions”. Hannibal spammed the starwars forums to shit with literally dozens of cut and pasted articles linking George Lucas and Starwars to the nazis. He even went as far into Nazi and antisemite history as the eighteen hundreds in an attempt to link the two.

This produced a fairly general reaction. Most Starwars fans, despite their feelings of rage against the prequels, were not happy to have the entire series equated with the propaganda of Herman Goering. Civ 2 briefly agreed that there were racist undertones in SW, however, but Hannibal was hardly satistfied. Forum goers such as Vwing, Just Your Average Movie Goer, HK47, Jordan, Jariten, JM Hoffman and SW forum mods Despondent and Civilian Number 2 were among the first respondents. Barend and Helena appeared later, and even Slade ventured into the SW forums to do battle, an omen of things to come.

Hannibal’s effects on different people were various. Jariten seemed to deal with him best. Vwing grew tired of him quite swiftly. In the same thread where he accosted Vwing, he drove Civ2 to randomly post cut and pasted articles of Ben Franklin and naked rats in parody. It was either Slade or Civ who finally corralled all (or, rather, some) of Hannibal’s topics into one massive thread known as George Lucas, Fascism and Anti-semitism: A Manifesto…” This thread contains numerous cut and pasted articles, and pictures as diverse as shriners, a man on a rocket, a JFK movie still, and of course, Nazis. The thread devolved into a bilateral war between Hannibal and JM, and even attracted an actual neo Nazi starwars fan named Thrawn.

Like most trolls, once he had tormented everyone in the SW forum enough, he moved on to other subforums. His favorite above all was the mournfully unprepared Debate Club, moderated by Slade. However it should be noted that he also popped up in the Screening Room, and the movie theater, where he posted pictures of jars of urine in honor of the release of The Aviator.

In the Debate Club Hannibal largely focused on attacking George Bush. Despite the liberal tilt of the forums, this brought fire from the conservatives such as Jordan because they liked Bush, but also from liberals and radicals, namely because much of what Hannibal posted was nonsense, and there was a lot of it. Threads include: “George Bush is a Moonie” “George Bush is a vampire” and, for some reason, “Che Guevara and Rush Limbaugh” He also threw up a spin off of his starwars rant in the television forum, “Is Star Trek Fascist?”

The frequent Bush bashing bothered Jordan perhaps slightly more than everyone else, leading him to speculate “That's because the guy is a fucking lunatic. Go look at his picture in the picture album. He probably eats coca leaves, drinks coffee, smokes cigarettes, and then shoots himself with adrenaline, just for breakfast. He posts 1000 topics a day, and never runs out of ranting steam. He's incoherent and a big piece of shit.”. Hannibals spamming of cut and paste topics raised tensions even in threads he wasn’t involved in, leading Slade to create the “Anger, Keep it away from the forums” thread. Hannibal made a brief appearance therein to berate Slade.

He did have brief moments of clarity however. His thread on the death of Hunter S Thompson was a conspiracy theory that actually seemed plausible, until he linked it to the explosion of the WTC and then failed to provide any further information. He also debated on Jordan’s side once in an argument over euthenasia when J M Hoffman brought religion into the matter.

Hannibal, his fingers worn down to nubs from hitting C/P so frequently, stopped posting for a while around 1000 posts, then returned to spam a lot. He was finally banned at this point, possibly the first forum user to be banned. His final destruction heralded the end of the golden age. However, he swore to return, and did so, frequently. Known and likely aliases include Ham Salad, H@nibbal and likely Mr. Howard Hughes. He was finally vanquished over a year after he was first banned. His status as the forums most legendary troll has never yet been challenged, and god willing, never will be. Hannibal lives on in forum legend even though many who did battle with him disappeared in the great migration. He is featured as the antagonist in J M Hoffman’s forum based rewrite of the SW prequels.

Defense Against the Dark Trolls with Professor J M Hoffman:

Hannibal’s trolling style was not directly offensive. He prefered to make infrequent use of character insults and obvious flames unlike others. The real problems he had were two fold. First of all, he spammed whole articles from other sites, and if anyone read them and disagreed, he would claim they didn’t understand. The other problem was that he had an incredible desire to talk down to everyone. Anyone debating past the cut and pastes jobs would be flooded with insinuations against their intelligence. EX:

“You wouldn’t understand”

“what is offensive is that you never bother actually to read what you are posting about“

“You are in this case: absolutely incorrect( and you know it ).”

He did occasionally resort to outright attacks however, once writing a lengthy accusatory poem against a debate opponent accusing him of being a “consumerist massage parlor”

When this failed he resorted to posting “rules of disinformation” and applying these to any argument against him. As should be obvious, he also greatly enjoyed playing the anti-semite/fascist card. This, coupled with a star of david avatar he wore, led some forum goers to believe that he was an overly paranoid militant Hebrew, but this theory was disproved, and indeed he was rather displeased that anyone thought he was Jewish, for some reason.

There was no known way to appease Hannibal. Queitely, sarcasticly agreeing with his conclusions only brought more copy and pastes, and there is no known occurrence of anyone having anything resembling a sensible debate with him. The only known defense against a Hannibal is to recite the “Ridiculous” charm, but what really finishes him off is laughter.

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 04 December 2008 - 06:25 AM

[Slade]

JM, the best defense against Hannibal was attempting to take him seriously. You and I had a Seussical debate in one of his threads. Good times.

Also, let us not forget the moment Barend first broke all of the post milestones, somehow having thousands more posts than everybody, all the time.

[SimeSublime]

Oh and speaking of Chyld, the puffin lemur thing has to get in there somewhere too, that was like the civil war of the forums or something. Or the crooked election..............................
But because we're glossing over things, I would like to point out that we need to keep a neutral point of view on any and all wild accusations of me rigging the puffin-lemur vote.

Hang on, the Puffin-lemur war wasn't Chylds. That was officially kicked off by Jane in response to my comments on the supremacy of Puffins. Chyld's contribution was some babbling about jellyfish towards the end.

Also, the start of the user-created stories thing was when Movie Goer posted an image of Boromir attacking George Lucas with a sword, entitled 'Movie Goer Strikes Back'. Everything else flowed from there.

Finally, Hannibal was the first to be banned. The only thing that could have beaten him would be obvious adbots.

[Otal Nimrodi]

He did occasionally resort to outright attacks however, once writing a lengthy accusatory poem against a debate opponent accusing him of being a “consumerist massage parlor"

His creative input is less than you think. The majority of that post was directly copy-pasted. I googled it.

Everything after the line break and then "And may I add", however, was entirely him.

[J m HofMarN]

Slade-
True, but he still got all pissed off and accused us of hijacking that and his cutting off body parts threads. Good times never the less.

Sime-
Aha! Now I know why I kept you alive. You're right, Chyld was the Jellyfish candidate and you, naturally, were for the puffins. I would have figured that bit out doing the research on it anyhow but its best to know now. I hope you'll write a bit on one of these events, naturally I imagine you'd be great for the puffin-lemur war, [zing]although history is usually written by the victors[/zing]

And good call on Hannibal, I hadn't been sure. I'll edit my chapter accordingly for the final version.

0tal-

The majority of that post was directly copy-pasted.

To me that seems a redundant statement since this was, after all, a Hannibal post. However since new users might see this, I think you're right. I'll add that part in as well. Also, another error I found: Civ didnt mention Franklin, it was Edison, on page 5 of this thread. My memory really is quite spotty these days. http://www.chefelf.c...?showtopic=1622

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 10 December 2008 - 11:07 PM

[Sailor Abbey]

Hey what happened to that robot kid – I can’t remember his name. I tried looking for him, but it looks like he’s been deleted or something, along with all of the threads he started. You know, that one kid who refused to tell anyone where he was from and mostly spoke in binary.

[Otal Nimrodi]

I have nothing constructive to add, so... OH MY GOD ITS SAILOR ABBEY!

[Vesuvius]

Hey what happened to that robot kid – I can’t remember his name. I tried looking for him, but it looks like he’s been deleted or something, along with all of the threads he started. You know, that one kid who refused to tell anyone where he was from and mostly spoke in binary.

Hmmm, would you be refering to Deepsycher? His commenting was awkward at times.

Although I'm not sure if he ever posted anything in binary. That's kind of cool, really.

0010110001110101110110000010110111110010110011... Yeah, that got my point across nicely.

[J m HofMarN]

Abby- hehe. there's some debate about whether he was a troll or not, but both him and Bond will both have their places in history.

Also, other people need to get writing!

[Otal Nimrodi]

Assign me something, then!

[civilian_number_two]

Jon GUtner dropped a lot of 1s and 0s in his posts, maybe she meant him? Most oif his posts were in his special sub-forum, which is gone, so it takes some searching to find anything from him.

I don't remember any business of refusing to say where he was from though, so maybe she means someone else.

[J m HofMarN]

Otal - Well, Civ is handling the Starwars forum history I think and I'm defense against the dark trolls... maybe you would like to research the fully ramblomatic explosion?

[J m HofMarN]

now that I'm back I've begun work enumerating The Great Homicest of Snake Logan. I should have it up within a week. Here's the first bit I've finished with the little feature largely completed, but the actual history and linkages will take more time.

The Great Homicest Of Snake Logan

The Era of the Great Homicest of Snake Logan is one of the more complicated troll assaults to explain. At first it seemed that it began around December fifth 2007. However, it was revealed in early 2008 that Snake had at least two alter egos on the forum, and one of them had appeared prior to the manifestation of Mr. Logan. As such, this history will be split into three parts, including the pre-homicest time when Snake Logan was known as Cobnat, and the post homicest when he went by Deuacon.

Although Cobnat was not a classic disagreeing type of troll, he was the less dangerous but potentially more divisive attention whore variety. The forums at large were mostly spared this as he concentrated all his energies on Fully Ramblomatic's forums, even drawing individual rebukes from Yahtzee (as opposed to Yahtzee's regular blanket rebukes of everyone).

Defense Against The Dark Trolls with Professor J M Hofmarn:

There are three varieties of trolls and three distinct ways to combat them. Hannibal exemplified the worst variety, the uber troll. Snake and Deuacon represented the merely oppositional troll, who had not yet graduated to the kind of outright flamery and spamming that exemplify the uber troll. However, the more poorly understood variety is the attention whore, or proto troll. While most trolls are male, this variety can occasionally include females, the only troll caste known to do so with any frequency.

The attention trolls are usually worse than the oppositional trolls for shear volume of posts, and are the least amusing troll type. They are easily spotted by the girth of threads they create, their attitude towards other users as their “audience” and the subjects of many of their threads. Their threads will most often if not always involve inane information about themselves presented without a thought to amusing others, or their opinions on things. They may also employ large attention getting avatars, signatures, etc. The frequent use of “I” or “me” in subject lines will be obvious. This variety of troll can be said, from a psychological point of view, to possess a low-grade histrionic personality disorder.

Generally when confronted for the girth of, or the pointlessness of their topics, they will dramatically and publicly swear off the forums, flame, or other such actions. Though it is rare that the troll will vacate the forums in actuality, often claiming to have, at the last minute, decided to stay. Usually for the professed reason of bothering everyone more or some such. The frequent use of words such as everyone and all of you are another staple of the attention troll, who will view the world differentiated between those on the stage (me) and those in the audience (everyone).

The preferred defense against the attention whore troll is simply to ignore them and try to close their threads as swiftly as possible. This will result in a temporary increase in post and thread volume (it is, after all, always darkest before the dawn), or more bafflingly, by the posting of one or more threads assuring that all attention trolling has ended. This, like all statements from this group, need be taken with a grain of salt. If the troll can be successfully ignored they will likely give up and leave.

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 30 January 2009 - 03:06 AM

[barend]

Attack of the Hannibal

This account of events totally under plays my awesome counterattacks (although in all fairness most of my magnificent comebacks are in threads now deleted - but that's still no excuse) and Hannie's total mancrush on me.

Seriously he comes back every second haloween and it's barend this, barend that.

The dude's in love.

[civilian_number_two]

LOL what was that about attention whores JM?