limbo - 1:56 pm on Mar 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's a bit of a paradox........

A friend recently divulged:

"I use deliberate baiting/trolling to incite popular, spirited and sometimes very heated debate among my users "Signing in as a psuedo member I will post stupid, inflammatory and contentious issues that will gain a large 'for and against' crowd. Then posing as one of the full members and as a Mod I will slowly direct the conversation to the good of the forum, showing my authority and capability to placate and rectify the problem leaving the 'fake' members happy and the real ones satisfied their forum is well policed"

He has also admitted to deliberate spamming:

"I deliberately spam the forum from time to time "It gives the impression that we have the interest/traffic to be worth spamming even though it may be a slow week, and again I can demonstrate my ability to act quickly"

This seems wrong but he's got a very popular forum now, says he occasionally generates threads like this to get this going and draw out lurkers.

Sometimes this backfires and the posts get very nasty, but because he has a constant eye on it he is well-equipped deal with the situation.

Seems to me he’s taking advantage of the trust of his users and will eventually lead to mistrust and misuse and ultimately exactly the type of posts he’s been baiting with.

Would you do this? Good idea? Common place? And if you found a forum you visited doing this, would you go back?