Discussion Forum

Troll hunt and forum problems

wickeddarkman wrote the following in
https://www.mtgvault.com/muktol/decks/ub-pauper-defensive-mill/
I decided to move the discussion into the forum area, so that we don't spam decks and keep them on the frontpage if no one is interested in it.

I blame the Facebook generation myself :)
It teaches young people to splash their lifes onto the net and cross their fingers they become popular.
If they don't, why work any more at it...

Gary is out there, and responds when called at, we might be able to cull some trolls through him, but I think it's more or less our own problem, because any fix gary might think of can be counteracted by crowd thinking. Someone will figure out a bypass, and then everyone else will follow.

I think it's a matter of showing the new generations that teamwork is the method.

In the past we used the hidden society strategy to upvote each others work, and postbump each other up the ladder.

Perhaps the way to do it it to form the exact same thing, but rather than doing it in secrecy, it could be done wide open.

The trolls would have to spend time on bumping their own stuff and would probably tire from the workload, I've tamed my troll by posting a zillion comments every time he downvoted one. It might be easy for him to click on a button to downvote me, but he'll have to find my comments first, and I usually upvote everyone else after commentstorming so he does face a workload everytime he downvotes.

Newcomers who see an unhidden upvoting club will suddenly realise that having connections in here is a thing, and would probably try to grease their way into our group, but if we "locked the gates" they might see blood and try to form groups with other people.

Then we would have an escalated upvote war, but at least people would start develop feelings for each others and the site. Humans are a warring species after all.

It hinges on how we would bring about a peace, but usually people come to respect the enemy during wartime. This was part of what drove phyrexia.com newcomers were greeted by trial of fire, and those who wanted the place were accepted over time.

What do you think ?

Posted 13 July 2021 at 11:13

30 replies

For the state of MTGVault I would have to blame the dev's. I took my time to scan through the bugs and suggestion forum a while ago, and basically the same suggestions (Bugs get repaired sometimes9 come up every 1-2 years. All you hear from the devs is "We ware working on this"...on WHAT and how LONG could it take to fix/ make it work? For me it's a lot easier to understand and accept things if there is an explanation, even if it might be "We can't tell, because we don't know ourself, but we will update you in XYZ days/weeks/ months".
Things like forum notifications, advanced search, reordering decks/ frontpage, linking cards with an apostroph in their names, and so on are still unanswered by the dev's. So why should we invest time on this site, when we get the feel that nothing is ever done?

For the state of deck-building and description I would have to blame the people who sent their friends on MTGVault but do so without a proper description on how to do things. They could even do it after they published their first deck, no matter how, some things should be explained. Garry once mentioned that he could think of making the descriptions a must have, or you couldn't release it. I wasn't quite happy with this suggestion, because it would mean a lot of one-liner descriptions our "-" or any other symbol in the box.

I don't have many contacts to young people, the big 4 is rolling at me with speed (birthday) and most of my friends are in a similar age and use Facebook, Instagram, ad what they all are called as communication platform. Sure, there are some runaways that like to spam the social platforms with reports about the consistency of their last meal, that was just flushed down the toilet, but honestly, I ignore such posts or, if possible, turn of notifications for such people.
I've hear and read about becoming a youtuber and making living with it bit honestly, I don't understand how this works (like I don't understand how our economy works, which bank would give you another credit if you're in the reds), I don't care and I'm not interested. And if you would translate the facebook/ youtube generation on MTGVault then the people would have to make decks that others take a look at, like and comment. The better a deck is described, the more people can understand how this will work and thus leave a commend or like.

As for your suggestion on official "society strategy", I agree, and a while ago I suggested on the forum to show who liked a deck. But, like explained in the first passage, I never got any other replay then "Good idea" or "We'll see to this". It could also be a good idea to show up and downvotes of comments, because I think this would stop a downvote troll from doing so, if people read his name all over the place.

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 11:38

Personal likes would certainly bring about some trust :)
Currently if someone say they upvoted you, you only have their words for it, and that was part of why our upvote clubs always fell appart, because you never really knew who supported you.

I'd say that it might also be better to get rid of the downvote, because multiple accounts can downvote you and it would be hard to prove if a troll were behind them all. This would also get rid of down voting trolls.

Multiple upvote accounts could still be used but the need to spam out decks would be lesser.

I remember talking to gary about replacing the active decks page with an active users page instead.
As an example, I recently posted 15 rw prison decks and instead of having them float on top of everything else, it would be easier to just have my username floating on an active user page. All the other active users could be there as well.

This would also prevent spam-trolling, because they would have to work a lot to keep all fake accounts floating on top of the active user page.

Aiming for radical changes, if you visit a user page it would be cool if less of the decks were listed, but instead you could see parts of the deck description.

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 12:34

There are some interesting ideas AND things that need to be fixed (like the notifications on forum messages), but I don't want to have to stomp someone's toes all the time, just to get something fixed, that would have been naturally for me to do, if it was my forum. And if I can't do it, then I should a.) say it to the people or b.) get someone who can. I know that calling for help is hard, but sometime its necessary.
This is one of the main reasons why I'm thinking on moving away from this site, like SPLiNTeR (don't know if I have the right username in my head and if I got the name spelled right) already did: Move away to site XYZ and see if the grass is greener there. It kind of makes me sad only thinking about it, not to mention the work that I will have exporting and importing all the decks, but in the end I think it would be better on a long term, to go somewhere else, where things that bother me here work.

As for the trolls, that's another thing that should be taken care of by the dev's. If someone like you is downvoted for no clear reason, then the dev's should be there to stop this. Either by banning the account, suspending it, or by other means. If I would have done something like the troll does here back in the WoW days on the official forum, and someone would have noticed, I would have felt the bannhammer.

Who do you think it is more fun to play with/ against on a real table? Mature (20+) or younger (6+) people?

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 13:16

Mature people are more fun to play against because crushing kiddies break their heart, and I'm in the game to crush pros to make things better for kiddies :)

I haven't complained to gary about the troll because I sort of like clashing with them. It's a mental challenge for me to figure ways out to beat them, I've always been a problem solver with the tendency to solve things myself.
That's probably why I would never leave.

I've been at the web almost as long as I've been playing magic and have seen countless forums die, the trolls move too when a place closes down, they will need their "fix"

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 14:13

The crushing isn't the part I'm worried about when playing against youngsters. You can always sit together afterwards and try to get a deck better together (In fact that's the part I like nearly as much as playing). But being defeated by a kiddie who doesn't even understand the deck it's playing ("No, my brother but this for me and told me what to play when") can drive me into an enrage.

I have because I think it's bad behaviour, and he promised to look into it, but I didn't see any reaction or improvement.

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 14:37

I mostly hate being defeated by kids because it shows me the weaknesses in my designs, I usually help them defeat me too :) most of the time my decks die to the strangest rogue kiddie builds because my decks are so adapted against the big guns. It's been a while though because I've been working on fine tuning my evolution projects.

The ones we should really blame are the game stores for not segregating age

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 16:48

By the way, splinter is not that gone.
He has been here recently.

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Posted 13 July 2021 at 19:19

I can't exactly say who it was, I would have to dig deep in comments. But it was one of the more active users and he said that he switched to tappedout and only visits Vault on occasion.

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Posted 14 July 2021 at 06:54

Could be him, he has been less active.

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Posted 14 July 2021 at 13:00

Anyways, user: aristophanes
After 9 years of silence he suddenly resurfaces, but rather than post quality decks with descriptions as he used too, he posts odd decks with 4 sol rings and 4 demonic tutors, no descriptions and no tags, and with 61 cards in the deck.
Not even bothering to name the decks.

It's clearly the troll who has managed to find a new old user account where the user was dumb enough to have the same password as their username.

The troll will then use that account to copypaste his own dumb decks between accounts, and then if noone marked the account as suspicious will use it as a platform to bury new decks by someone he dislikes.

I've described the process in some of my stuff tagged: wdm troll
He clearly thinks he's not being watched at the moment, but I'm constantly vigilant of this pattern.

Hmm. Took a closer look at the past decks, and it seems like the troll has simply chosen to revive an older troll account.

This means that he's been trolling this place for at least 11 years, so odds are he'll troll us for 11 more.

Seems like his "signature" back then was to build decks with 65 cards.

He's not become better at deckbuilding in those 11 years, deckbuilding isn't his modus operandum

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Posted 16 July 2021 at 17:36

Question is: What is the troll after? Why is he doing this?

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Posted 19 July 2021 at 08:01

To get the feeling of being superior and feel smarter than others.
9% of magic players are really brainy, so by trolling brainy people he feels super brainy.

Each time I put up a very brainy post he uses several accounts to make it less visible by upvoting and updating his own stuff.

This means he's also securing that people won't get smarter, so in a sense, by plastering his work he is dumbing down the average user, because they are not feed with quality, but only sees his junk.

As long as people don't stand together he actually wins by undermining the knowledge base.

Considering the amount of time he's been at it hes probably one of the first to try out information warfare.

He's probably dumb as a door, but he has discovered that by dumbing down everyone else he might actually end up being just a little smarter.

He can't compare to the smartest of us, which is why we become part of the target.

I've talked about defeating him through a higher workload, the more he has to work for his sabotage, the more visible he becomes and the more mistakes he makes. Right now he's flooding us with 40/20 decks
(40 of card A and 20 of land A) because I've been stressing him out with my RW prison project.

I suggest you join the frain, do your best to make posts with nice descriptions to exhaust him.

If enough people produces quality he will be the minority and people will adapt good behaviours.

He will then try to wait us out and start over again when we relax ourselves.

It's pretty obvious.

If you post something really good and it's burried in posts later the same day, study the contents of all posts above yours, try to memorize the usernames and you will be able to see the accounts he uses.

Right now he's revived a very old strain of accounts

Try searching for decknames with the word "tard" he's behind a lot of those.

Leaving "signatures" is part of the idea of him being clever, because we are feed with stories about how clever people leaves a signature. It's a myth, but most serial killers actually get caught because they leave signatures. It isn't clever, it's dumb, but they too are feed with that myth, so they all try to be clever by doing it.

But because most people aren't aware that the troll gets a kick out of the signature game, then he feels clever by not being found out.

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Posted 19 July 2021 at 19:33

The "tard" troll came to mtgvault with a plan in mind.
He started out with a few accounts, didn't mingle, but did study us for three years, probably to understand as much of the lingo as possible. He may or may not have used the lingo in game stores, he has reacted faster in an effort to bury posts where I talk of paedophiles, and I think he started down voting my comments around that time.

After he studied us, he started up several accounts, where he posted a single deck, with some obvious flaw in it to trigger a response, and those that got a hit he practiced his lingo on.

The tard troll is the most visible because he uses the same pattern in all his accounts
Search for the username: tard
ALL his fake accounts will be visible, most just hold a single deck with a flaw in it, usually just a provoking number of cards in the deck. In other accounts he has about 6-12 decks, all with the same flaws.

Because he is not trying to be subtle and think he's the smart one it's pretty clear that he's behind all tard accounts.

We could show that to Gary.
Gary might be able to find all the IPs of the troll and bar him for a while.

He started out in 2006 and is still very active...

In 2013 he started a second identity "noob"
Search for the username: noon
You will see basically the same approach, but some of these posts are much more spam than usual.
Look at the newest noob post which is visible now, it's basically spam and nothing else.
He made that account in 2013 to spam with it now.

And when you start looking all over the place and know what to look for, it's pretty easy to see an immense trail of spam.
It's all he does, just to feel like a super spy...

I suspect he uses the search filters to find his own accounts, and I suspect he uses the same password for absolutely all of them.
If gary did a little coding, he could find out that password, and then delete all accounts using that specific password.

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Posted 20 July 2021 at 12:39

I'm happy that you've the time and energy to battle the troll, but I'm just looking on Vault while waiting for the calculations on my PC to go on, so my time and energy for this is very limited. It's a wonder I'm looking on Vault on a daily basis, normally I even forget to take pills, which I would have to do on a regular basis. ;)

I'm not sure getting Gary to do something would be the right way.
I'm also not sure if Gary is still interested in this site. Yes, the newest sets are added, some sooner...some laaaaaaaaater. But if you look at the site, what has changed on the last years? The last changes I can remember was the legality settings in the decks...which doesn't help you at all. Many other suggestions and even bugs are still not processed. It reminds me of some games you can buy on Steam, or other gaming platforms, that are in it's alpha state: Let's deliver something and see if the people buy it. When they do so, we don't have to finish the game, if they don't we have to do something. Another example for this would be the anniversary edition of HeroQuest, made in Spain. They took orders in advance, taking the money, but telling the people that the models can't be cast, then the delivery has some problems, then its something else.

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Posted 21 July 2021 at 06:44

Did you look at the usernames with the key phrases ?
These are just 3 key phrases out of about a hundred...
One person souring the whole site for the lolz...

I'm in the process of registering all the dates and amounts of cards in the decks to make it easier to understand how clear a pattern we are dealing with.

At the moment the troll has become emboldened by no real reactions to him on the site, so he's intensified his sabotage.

Are you really careless about the same lame post getting upvoted 13 times, with just 40 of the same beetle and 20 swamps ?

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Posted 21 July 2021 at 07:12

No, I'm not careless. When I see such a deck I normally think "What where you thinking about, beside nothing, to post such a thing", close the deck, and look at the next one. Idiots and people who try to milk the system are everywhere and for me there are two ways: Ignore them or battle them. To battle them would show them how annoying and effective their work is, so ignoring it is for me. Like with the bully's on the school-yard.
Also Vault has gotten pretty small in form of active users, there's only a handful left of the good ones. If you're looking at the decks and the people who comment, you will always read the same ~15 names. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but the number is pretty stable. So I'm trying to look for those names, and focus on their decks. But I don't want to ignore new users, because sometimes there are new faces that care about commenting and respond to suggestions and comments.
Sadly you can't ignore certain users, or at least their decks.

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Posted 21 July 2021 at 07:47

The way I see it, the troll is here to stay to the very end, and he'll spoil the fun for any newcomers which is why the place has gotten strangled to death.
He came to mtgvault with the concept of how to troll us readymade. He studied us for three years before he really started out on his attacks.

Ignoring him means the death of this place.
That's not in my nature.

There is only one way to win wars, and that's to break the opposition.
I've promised not to take him on on my own, but I know how to let others do the work.

Somewhere among the remnants of mtgvaulters there is likely someone capeable of taking him out. If it wont be gary and his team it will be someone else. Theres always a bigger fish

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Posted 21 July 2021 at 10:42

Meh, engaging on my own anyways ;)

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Posted 22 July 2021 at 14:51

Working on an exposure post, and will put out a copy here in the chillout area.

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Posted 22 July 2021 at 19:06

So far the troll is pretty clueless about what can happen potentially.
Each time he makes a post I descramble the username, find his keyword and write a short message on the post that includes the keyword of that post.

As a result he now knows that I'm tracking his every move, and this has made him experiment with some of his older keywords, for example he has tried to make soma into so_ma. I checked to see if that was searchable, but it isn't, so in the long run he won't be able to search for keywords with an _ in them.

A lot of his older key phrases has similar experiments in them, but I'll be able to collect any new account he makes and learn any new systems he builds up.
It's basically checkmate, he's just not seeing it yet.

His best strategy is to resurface in about 3 years.

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Posted 23 July 2021 at 21:02

Have you ever thought that doing so could make you a troll in other peoples opinion?

Make a suggestion in the bugs&suggestion forum, to eliminate the "_" search bug :)

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Posted 26 July 2021 at 06:48

Exactly this. Basically wdm is the only troll we have.

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Posted 26 July 2021 at 13:12

So you finally found out something was going on behind the scenes :)
I got quite a collection of key phrases to present to gary, then we shall see whom he considers to be the troll.
Kipplingwarhol
Dumplingman
Splinter
Whatever pli you wish to be taken out as :)

Real smart to storm in and call me troll when you haven't posted anything forever,
That screams of an emotional response, but comming from where ?
Logic dictates why you act in such a rushed state of mind.
Nice to know that you do have feelings :)

And yeah muktol, I have been through that, but don't we all think the government is a troll?
There is the greater good to think of, and unlike others I'm willing to cause collateral damage to get rid of someone whom has infested this place like a rot since 2006.

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Posted 26 July 2021 at 22:19

Oh no! Out of pure emotion i was careless for one second since 2006, now you got me! Well played!
"To get the feeling of being superior and feel smarter than others."

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Posted 27 July 2021 at 05:22

I live each day knowing I'm smarter than most, but I'm not so ignorant as to think noone will ever best me.
You've called me a troll perhaps 10 times now, and each and every time I've referred to that single day where YOU actively trolled the site, and everytime you seem to forget that I'm remembering that instance.

I've also asked you before that if I'm the only troll on mtgvault, then how did my reputation go from 2200 to -2000 in about two weeks.

You seem to be experiencing memory problems all the time, it makes me believe you need some sort of system to remember things more clearly.

It's quite the coincidence that the troll seems to have a problem remembering which account he used within a few weeks.

I'm thinking there might be a correlation present...

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Posted 27 July 2021 at 12:20

What exactly did i do to troll this site again?
Did anybody else get downvoted that much? I mean is it your problem, or mtgvaults? No one else is complainig in the forum section about this and it feels like with all your effort in this conspiracy, things only get worse.
For example i also read and commented your welcome post here a while ago, but deleted it because i was not in the mood to fight again.
Please take an objective look at that post.
Is that how we welcome new players? Telling them about an degenerated community? How this site is ruled by some trolls? Putting them under rules you thought out? And then self promote you and your tag system?

I can help and upvote a bunch if your goal is to rebuild your reputation, but i really would like to see you shifting down a gear or two. By now you are literally stalking users and accuse them of using this site in a wrong way.

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Posted 27 July 2021 at 13:32

As I've said, I've gathered plenty of material to hand over to gary.
It should be easy for him to design a small sub routine that trawls through the user accounts and count the number of identical passwords, because the troll uses plenty of accounts but probably uses the same password over and over, because why create multiple accounts with multiple passwords.

So far I've decided to give the troll a change to go "normal" but if he insists on going bad, I'm simply giving gary the idea of how to check for trolls.

If you wanna see direct evidence of spam on mtgvault, just go there today, look at the current tags on the active page
And click on troll. Someone is binge-tagging to increase their chance of being seen.

You could also start to think about what exactly it is that I have read in this post and start to search for usernames in the mtgvault search engine start by searching for tard.

You may also want to see that venomousdragonking slammed 8 decks in a row comming from out of nowhere.

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Posted 27 July 2021 at 23:38

Im pretty sure that admins can not see our passwords, at least they should not be able to.

Also i am very well aware of spamming, after you posting like 20 of the same prison deck in a row from a 2018 meta that i asume noone cares about in 2021 (simian spirit guide even is banned by now) So if that happens, cant you just ignore it instead of putting another 5 troll posts out there?

I see you selfpromote everywhere you possibly can, so whats wrong when someone else tries to increase their chances of being seen too? - if your implication even is correct, because you do not know. Could also be a bug with the tags, no?

So there is a new user who archives his 8 decks here.
What makes you think he is spamming but you are not?

Anyways, i do not want to deal with this any further, so do whatever you think is best, but let other people do whatever they want too. Especially please try not to scare new users off.

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Posted 28 July 2021 at 08:09

I actively support new users, and now that I can distinguish between real users and the troll, I'm doing so.

Gary is at minimum a codesigner of the place, so he'll likely have access to passwords, and the way mtgvault is generally set up as a database, passwords will be part of it. He might have been curious about some passwords being used more than others, but I think the troll has a password for each key phrase or might be dumb enough to have used the same password for everything.

My RW prison is an active project, with goals and an endgame. You might not have noticed that it's been split in two now, because 1 generation of it has been concluded. The basis for the project is linked to two decks so progress can be seen.

If I truly wanted to troll mtgvault, I would do it with halfdecks.
I could simply design 10 halves and put them together in all 49 combinations.
Then I'd do it all over again with 10 new halves.

It would take me a minimum of time to produce this and would create 49 decks in no time.

You do seem to dislike MY work and think of it as trolling, but where is your hate of trolling when the same users generate EDH deck after edh deck with just 1 card changed in the deck ?

My RW project always shift 9 cards that alters the build and strategy immensely.

How come you never go at three throat of people posting 60 black lotus and write "good stuff in the title"

Or those who post 40 coilbug and 20 swamps ???

I've never seen you complain to those...

If we get new users, I'll freaking shredd their asses.

Except there aren't new users, we only have dormant troll accounts.

Go ahead, give me the name of a truly new user that I have bothered.

Actually dninja89 is a new user go ask him about my behavior :)

If you are so concerned for what happens in here, why don't you voice it ?
People will listen, provided that your post isn't spamburried within half of a day...

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Posted 28 July 2021 at 20:18

Oops :) the line
"If we get new users I'll shred their asses"
Was supposed to say
"If we get new users LIKE THAT, I'll shred their asses" :)

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Posted 28 July 2021 at 21:08