Craigslist has been an amazing community based message board. Slowly and organically grown by word of mouth, the message board has slowly grown over the past couple of years and now supports dedicated posting for most cities. With the amount of viewer ship increasing it was only a matter of time before the Trolls showed up.
troll v.,n. 1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on the Internet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase “trolling for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “trolling”, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you do not fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. 2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that the have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand – they merely want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, “Oh, ignore him, he is just a troll.”
See: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/cpg/46309207.html, or http://losangeles.craigslist.org/cpg/46255755.html, or http://losangeles.craigslist.org/cpg/46106006.html for examples.
Large web based message board systems (like Slashdot and Kuro5hin) have been battling this for quite some time now. What does this mean for Craigslist? Well if you follow the path that others have taken: 1st) a community based message moderation system were randomly a visitor on the site is asked to review/rank a posting, and then ultimately 2nd) the end of anonymous posting.
I believe in privacy rights, I believe that what you do when you are on the internet should be completely anonymous. But when you start posting to web pages and sending email your anonymity should end there. It’s amazing the type of people that surface from the woodwork when their names are not available to the audience. And unfortunately a small group of people will undoubtedly spoil a good thing for everyone.