Having only been here a short while I've learned to recognize troll threads. In the beginning I admit to having fed them mainly due to their visibility. However, I now mostly ignore them. As others have said, self moderation is the key - troll ignoring causes them to loose interest.

I think there are also various newbie posts which are considering the same as trolling as the person so obviously hasn't searched for the answer to the topic first - part of this is obviously laziness on the part of those people but I don't think that the "quality" (ahem) of the Search function helps... It takes a while to realize that Power Search is much more useful.

Jokes are good but repeated jokes are tedious!

So, I guess my view can be summed up as:

- Starve the Trolls

- Attempt to be nice to newbies for a short while (even if them make exceedingly dumb posts) unless they prove themselves to be trollish

- Perhaps try and restructure the forum presentation in some way so that searching is easier and troll spawn doesn't dominate?

- Only post a joke if it's funny and hasn't been done before

(Oh, and I think the poll attached to this thread is too simplistic so am not taking part)