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We have a troll at mtgvault, and this will be an all out exposure if his evildoings.

THE WEAKNESS OF OUR TROLL

The trolls biggest weakness was to mess with "the wicked"...

Nah, he's been messing with us all, without most of us knowing it, and I was probably the most clueless of them all.

The difference here, between me and you, is that I sort of "live" when I find a pattern that I can latch on and analyse.

This story started when I noticed that whenever I wrote something good in here, other users became strangely active and my post got burried under their posts and would then not be noticed by anyone else.

It had me puzzled for quite a while but to start with I just assumed it was the trafic in here, because thinking that about 10 users would work together to bury my post with theirs was downright absurd and pretty paranoid.

As time went by, I writ some posts about quality, because a real large number of those users had some pretty inane and sometimes directly stupid posts. But there was a bit of difference in content between them so with luck I could persuade some of them to provide better material. If my own work would be burried at least I would have something good to read.

As time went even more by, I got caught up by the patterns emerging, and being an asperger, I'm actually good at spotting them.

As a result I one day declared that we had a troll. I couldn't put a name to anyone, but there was a clear pattern that whenever one of the best users in here would produce a nice post it would get burried within a day. Otherwise mtgvault would run at an entirely different pace.

Noone really knew what to say about this, because after all, what I got was an instinctual feeling, no real proof.

So I worked on a number of posts to set up a trap. I would pretend to be in a productive mode while in reality I had premade the stuff, and then I posted one and sat in front of the screen for hours, waiting for the troll to make his move, but by being ready for it I spotted the first real evidence of the trolls activity.

In a really short time period, several users posted stuff enough to bury my post.
At that time I did not spot the true common denominator between them, but I did notice a pattern in the post title.

All of them contained the word retard put in the headline in different ways, and the odds of about 8 different users all putting "retard" in the title by coincidence was just plain ridiculous.

So I launched a war against the troll and rallied people to find new ways to cooperate so that we could get rid of the troll or at least ignore it. The troll even joined in on the campaign, probably to sabotage it, but people couldn't gather fully around this threat, perhaps because noone really understood it, and many of my efforts were absorbed by the troll.

During my troll campaign the troll actually slowed down his burying, and a few people made more content, but for me, it wasn't really enough. The troll was also down voting my comments, most likely to prevent me from being seen by others, and he must have hit me with about 4000 downvotes, because at that time my reputation was around 2500 and it went to -2200 for a number of weeks.

To be honest, a lot of my work was centered on two things, one to show the users in here that he existed, and to pressure him to make mistakes.

And his first real mistake was to mess with "the wicked" by down voting my reputation he sort of made himself much more visible (if the idiot had just left me 5-10 reputation I would seem like a noob rather than a victim)

The troll also slowed down his burying scheme, either because he thought it would make him less visible, or because he knew I was smart and on his trail.

All of that made me intensify my campaign and brainstorming, and in some way the troll made me a better person. I managed to stress myself, my methods and my material to new levels, and I give a nod to human warfare which lead to superior medicinal knowledge. War spawns technology, as much as it destroys things.

When user: puschkin told me to stop my war, because I was tearing mtgvault appart I said sure, I'll stop.

From that point on, when people asked about the troll war described in my interlinked posts I would answer their question and tell that I've been told to stop hunting it and that I would honor that wish.

The troll must have thought that it was a trap, and it sort of was, so I've been running an "I'm ignoring the existence of the troll" campaign.

I've been tracking his moves just as much as usual while trying to produce just as much material as during the troll war, to be a red cloth waving in front of the troll.

Slowly the troll has increased his burying and he has even turned to directly visible troll behavior in obvious attempts to get me triggered again, and about 3 days ago he exposed his weakness by becoming too careless and trolly for his own good.

Our troll has been using lots of "fake" accounts, and I estimate that from 2006 and up to now, he has probably created several thousand accounts.

Yeah, several thousand...

So one question eluded me during the troll war, how the hell does someone remember that many usernames ???

If it was me, I would have made lists and kept them in notebooks, and the troll sort of did that, but he added a twist.

Those three days ago, I saw a relatively new username, and that was all it took to make things fall into place and I knew I'm finally capeable of taking down that evil son of a dark unnameable thing.

Here's the thing, mtgvault is a database, which means that when you search for specific things you get a result, even when you aren't fully specific.

The troll has used this feature to produce his thousands of accounts while needing to remember just a few keywords.

All the troll need is to put that keyword into a username, and then mtgvault will show all accounts with the keyword.

That way he just needs to have a list of keywords to gain access to any of his older accounts.

Mtgvault remembers everything for him, and that's also his weakness.
He needs mtgvault to remember, because otherwise he'd have to create a real big number of lists with all his usernames, and he's to lazy for that, so he's painted himself into a corner.

After you've finished reading this post, use the search engine to search for the username: tard

I'll mention this again at the bottom, so carry on reading.

Since 2006 the troll has amassed a large number of other keywords, but I focussed my initial research on the keyword tard.

As said 'tard' showed up in 2006, and for about three years seemed mostly passive.
The number of usernames he produced was very low, but it hinted that he had used this method long before he came to mtgvault.

He seems to have been studying us for those three years to learn the lingo of the place, which was actually rough and a lot of trolls seemed to be around.

When 'tard' was ready he launched several accounts, and a number of posts with "bait"

The bait was simply a decklist with an inherent flaw in it, he would for example post a mono black deck with only black cards and then he would put in marsh Flats, the black white fetchland.

And this is where the story actually turns tragical.

You see, at 2009 the most trollish users would fly into a rage over this, so in a way, he started out as a troll hunter.

My guess is that as time went on people got more structured, and a lot of cliques were formed that had the unforeseen consequences that it became a sort of group trolling.

The cliques would consist of people who would comment on each others posts to become more visible as a group.

Our troll engaged these people as well, as he probably marked them as trolls too.

In other words, he turned bad hunting the trolls in here, because he got used to see them everywhere and tried to stop them.

He got more and more embittered and created more and more accounts, growing ever larger as a troll to the point where I spotted him and started chasing him making a troll of myself in the process.

I'm not sure that the troll can let go of his death grip on this site, and my only weapon to slay him with has been exposure.

In the future I will trace down his key phrases so everybody will be able to see his work clearly, and frankly he's not smart enough to hide those keywords very well.

People are welcome to make a treasurehunt out of it and I will gladly register new key phrases as they are discovered.

Do note that almost all usernames connected to those phrases must contain a high number of "baits" that seems to trigger some people.

Knowing a lot of those keywords has made me see how often this guy has actually baited me and triggered me because I didn't know that it was him.

I do believe the we should sort of resocialize him and make him revert to a single account, as he can be a nice guy.

The one person who has the best resources to deal with the troll is the sites creater gary, and I'm gonna outline one way to deal with the problem.

If the troll continues, hellbent on annoying us, the easy solution is to gather up key phrases, because there's one more weakness to the trolls approach.

Having thousands of accounts he has probably used the same password for most of them, so gary can probably get a small program designed that trawls the password from each account in key phrases we use.

When searching for usernames containing 'tard' the database reveals decks from 56 users, all of which are VERY likely to contain the same password.

This is something gary can use to select accounts to be deleted, and considering that one person for 15 years have poured junk after junk into this place, taking up valuable data, then gary might figure out how to build a program that finds and flags new users that use a common password. It might even correlate by identifying common denominators in the usernames.

I think it's sad, but I think we could flourish so much more without the troll.
We could give him the chance to throw the towel in the arena and perhaps tell his story. Most of his decks are trawled from other sites which is why he has been able to work so fast over the years, but he must have mixed some of his own stuff in there.

I'd like the oppinion of the community on this one.

CAN THERE BE A PEACE BETWEEN US ???

Now go search for username: tard
You will find that all 56 usernames has some truly badly baited decks but he has to run about 20 accounts on a weekly basis to be as invisible as possible.

Here are additional key phrases where I found a large number of usernames with trollish and baiting posts. I did not go through those keywords with the same thoroughness, so a few of these users may just have been unlucky to create an account username that contains the keyword. I put them here to show you the extend of the trolls activity and how it's used. If the majority decides to hang the troll, then I'll engage in a more thorough analysis of each of them. I will also be hunting for more keywords to present to gary if needed.

Car
Mat
Boca
Bone
Eat
Red
Anna
Lay
Leber
Lex
Ward
App
Lear

Kind regards, wickeddarkman.