The Troll


After almost ten years of showcaves.com, I've slowly had to come to terms with the fact: Cavers, especially the German ones, sometimes exhibit a considerable TROLL quality. Perhaps this comes from all the bent over crawling and creeping in tiny and uncomfortable holes.

In internet jargon, a troll is a person who spouts outrageous things or behaves in a deliberately rude manner in order to gloat over the indignant reaction. The speleologist trolls I know don't even deserve this definition, they don't even have that much humour...

The Information Hiding Troll

It happens again and again that I receive indignant emails saying that this or that should not be published. The nature conservation argument is particularly popular.

A long-time diver, who knows every karst spring in Thuringia inside out, demands that we should refrain from mentioning them, otherwise others might want to dive there.

Such demands make my face flush with anger. For one thing, I would never have thought of promoting cave diving. In my opinion, it's the quickest and safest way to commit suicide anyway. On the other hand, I have described karst springs that are located in villages and are enclosed by walls and are usually found in a beautifully landscaped small park. One wonders how a visit to the spring by a few tourists can damage it more than the intensive use and alteration by humans over the centuries has already done.

The only serious reason I could think of to explain this demand was to secure sinecures. Anyone who practises such an elitist sport as diving in Thuringian karst springs would not want to be rivalled...

The Rude Troll

People who behave in a deliberately and stubbornly rude manner - whether out of laziness, ignorance or stupidity - are a completely different matter.

In the Internet and Usenet, there is the well-known netiquette. The artificial word, formed from net and etiquette, refers to a set of simple rules that are intended to simplify communication on the Internet, just as the rules of politeness (see etiquette) do in everyday life. And just as the use of a tablecloth for cutting is generally considered impolite by the host, the same applies on the Internet to e-mails in capital letters (shouting), bold attachments on first contact or e-mails that are so brief that the author is not even clear. Would people send a real letter without a sender and signature?

Anyone who has been online for a while has already pointed out to dozens of newbies that they are behaving rudely, perhaps without realising it. I would describe a reference to netiquette, which enables the newbie to learn what they have done wrong and why, as constructive. Not so the vast majority of trolls. They have obviously committed this offence deliberately, playing the punks of the data channels, so to speak. A nice comment is usually answered with insults, abuse or not at all.

A particularly extreme case was the nice e-mail from a courier from Switzerland that I received before DSL. After just under half an hour of downloading with a 33.6 modem, I had an e-mail in my inbox with the words ‘Greetings from Switzerland!’ and the sender's address. I was then somewhat taken aback by the content of the attached Word file: On a single page, the same text was repeated again in a much nicer font, spiced up a little by four pretty little pictures. And I paid a few marks in telephone charges for something like that! After a slightly annoyed reply from me, I (fortunately) never heard from him again.

Technical note: the four pictures as jpg files were less than 50k in size. That was a DAU mistake, unfortunately at my expense. And he could easily have avoided it if he had invested ten minutes in reading a page on netiquette. Among other things, this problem is explained in detail there.

The Bickering Troll

But the self-proclaimed know-it-alls and bickering trolls are particularly ‘funny’. It seems they need the stress of the argument to push their adrenalin levels to the right level.

A very well-known example is ex-cave diver and owner of the only cave diving submarine. Always in the media because of fantastic theories. Not that this is a bad thing, Alfred Wegener's continental drift was also fantastic in the 1930s and was accepted in the 1960s. But this person immediately feels personally attacked by any professional criticism and then strikes back relentlessly. This bickering quickly becomes boring for the viewer. No idea how he will react to this comment, after all, it is a personal criticism.

Unfortunately, stories like this prove that there are particularly many cavers who like to argue with others for the sake of arguing. When asked why he climbed Everest, Edmund Hillary replied ‘because it's there’. The quarrelling troll doesn't admit it so openly, but he quarrels for the sake of quarrelling.

In a way, the speleologists are continuing a centuries-old tradition of the geologists. Two hundred years ago, there were riots and fisticuffs when a new theory estimated the earth to be ten or a hundred times older than previously believed. However, a bishop and geologist from England had irrefutably proven that the earth was created in the year 4004 BC, at a quarter past nine on a Sunday morning. This was proven by the time data in the Old Testament. This realisation is worth fighting for!

The dispute among dinosaur researchers whether the dinosaurs died out slowly (after all, a few million years is not a very quick death) or perished in a catastrophe led to the so-called Bone Wars at the end of the 19th century. ‘Serious’ scientists hired gunslingers to wrest the bone finds from their competitors by force of arms.

The Anonymous Accusation Troll

This text is actually already historical, as mentioned at the beginning it was a summary after 10 years, and since showcaves.com has been around since 1993, the upper part is already 20 years old. It's probably time for an update. I've hardly received any emails of the above types for years, either people have actually learnt how to use the internet, or the trolls are bored by dealing with caves. What still comes regularly, however, are e-mails in the category ‘No salutation, no sender address, no explanation’ but an accusation. Famous is ‘Page XY is wrong and needs to be revised’. Since every reasonably detailed description contains a multitude of small facts, it is simply a matter of probability that one of them is not correct. Either we have misinterpreted or misunderstood the source, or the source was wrong, or it is simply out of date. Since we started adding the year to the opening times and admission prices, there have been fewer such accusations, at least from this corner. What the authors of such accusations don't seem to realise is simple:

  1. A source has to be assessed, otherwise anyone could spout bollocks and we would include it without criticism, so it is necessary to introduce yourself.
  2. A minimum level of politeness should not overtax anyone; this includes a salutation and a signature.
  3. Anyone who discovers an error should point it out; with several hundred small facts on the page, it is impossible to guess which one the writer was referring to.
  4. Labelling an entire page as WRONG because a small error has crept in at one point is impolite, not to say aggressive.

In other words: when we receive an e-mail like this, we take it as an opportunity to update the page. Whether we find and correct the ‘error’ the TROLL was talking about is uncertain, but we don't care. We also don't care about the sender of the message, whoever that may be, and the more aggressively they behave, the less seriously we take them. Any correction to the page must be based on an independent source.