What Does This Mean?
A user who deliberately posts provocative or offensive messages on a discussion forum to stir up emotional reactions or derail threads. What counts as trolling is subjective, and "don't feed the trolls" is the usual advice for dealing with it.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""Every thread had the same forum troll posting bait until the moderators banned the account.""
LORE & ORIGIN
Wikipedia's Internet troll article defines trolling as deliberately posting offensive or provocative messages online to provoke emotional reactions, notes that whether a post is trolling is subjective, and says the first recognised use of the internet sense was in the early 1990s on Usenet's alt.folklore.urban ("trolling for newbies"), with the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation from 1992. It also says trolling is closely linked to flaming and can derail discussions. "Forum troll" is simply that figure on forums and has no separately documented origin. Wiktionary has no entry for it (HTTP 404).
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