Thanks for the tips!

My way of doing things is never back down. Once you back down and give in, the person(s) bullying you will notice that it is getting to you and this makes it easier for them to keep on. Stand your ground. If you stand your ground, in most cases, bullies will see this and back off. What fun is it to bully a person that it wont get to them? If you have ideas, suggestions, or need help and people disregard you or bully you, don’t give in, only to be ashamed of yourself. Don’t think you are a failure.

Keep your head high and your esteem flowing. Once you show the bullies that their tatics are not going to work, you will gain respect from them. And if not, that’s their loss.

The number one rule though is to be careful. Do not put 100% trust on anyone be it on the internet or in real life. Until you either know this person real well or know them in real life, they could take advantage of you and/or others.

There are Religions which bully people, and Islam is the worst offender I know of.

Bullies are just cowards,complete and utter cowards, they go for the people they might think are the weak ones, and if the ‘weak one’ they are picking on stands back to them, they usually go into a state of complete shock and they won’t say another word.

Life seems to have a way of filtering out the bullies though. The usual way it goes is the person who was being bullied builds a successful life for themselves, and the bullies end up with nothing, because they soon get the smack in the face and realise that talking down, and ridiculing someone doesn’t make them a better person, and it won’t get them anywhere successful in life. Only stuck back in the same frame of mind they where in school.

-Mark

I always try and use logic when talking/debating with others, a class in formal logic in collage helped in this area. I always try and keep my emotions in control, and if I since the other person is uptight or upset by what I have said, or because (in the real world) I raised my voice, I try and explain myself and where I was coming from. I have rarely had to get into an verbal altercations in the real world or virtual world, one was with a troll in a yahoo egroup who was being rude to the whole group and making threats, I even had to contact his ISP after he sent me a virus. He was nice after that, but was bored after his thunder was gone and left the group. The only other real time was when, some women kept spamming a egroup I run with messages advertising a dating site. Normally, I just ban people, but after several e-mails for the same site from different users who would join just to spam the group, I was forced to send several e-mails to the dating site and the the user’s ISPs. Even with this, it took several months for the spam to stop, I have a zero tolerance for spam and, I won’t even stay in groups once I see they have spam.

I do feel however that, some people set themselves up to be victims, such as some of those who post videos on youtube
where you ask yourself, what were they thinking? Also, those who post the hate filled videos deserve to have people throw it back in their face, just like when people post hate filled comments. Some users are actually video trolls who post provocative and or hateful videos in much the same way standard trolls type provocative and or hateful messages, they just do it to get the attention. One troll of note posted an infamous video of himself being upset about fans hating on Britney Spears, unfortunately the banter is still going back and forth over a year later, and you’ll accidentally run across it somewhere in youtube. Now, if this guy got on TV and even had a TV show lined up before caught on to what was happening, we know people will post anything and do anything for attention.

Sometimes, they will post one push button post or video and just sit back and watch the flame ware between user erupt and grow. I have seen an entire group fall apart because of trolls like that. For individual users, I would complain to a group owner privately. I would not respond to a bully/ troll, it only serves to feed their ego if they know they made you angry. If you have a group owner who is not doing their job by screening all new users for their first few posts to screen out the trolls, than join a group who’s owner is doing their job. You can usually tell which group’s owners are not doing their jobs because they are full of spam. This may be more difficult in forums, but if there are a lot of messages that lead to spam sites, or when you go through old messages in the forum after joining and see past outbursts caused by trolls, it my not be a good place to hang out. Most good forums and good groups have well spelled out rules as to user conduct, and even these are superseded by the terms and conditions of the company that hosts the site. For example, a yahoo egroup may have its own rules within the group, but yahoo’s terms and conditions for user conduct supersede those rule. In other words, yahoo’s rules come first, lol.

Well, be good to one another, and good surfing.

Thanks for posting it Chris.