This post used to contain a large round-up of archival links to folks writing about the Wiscon Troller, a woman who, in 2008, attended the Wiscon feminist science fiction convention, got in a useless fight with someone there, and posted fat-shaming and geek-shaming pictures of some folks with whom she took issue.
She was young and an undergrad at a local university and she got a lot of backlash for what she did. It’s a shame when folks have to learn the hard way that things done on the Internet sometimes matter and sometimes count.
Today I got a pretty humble request from this person to remove the post and she provided some evidence of doing good work toward social justice since then (she claims to have been instrumental in making this talk and attendant workshops and has asked me to provide the link here) and seemed pretty interested in moving on and finding a better way to be, so I have taken the content that was here offline to a personal archive.
I am willing to do two things for folks interested in pursuing this issue:
1) If you would like private access to my archives, drop me a line
2) If you want to talk directly to the person at the root of the issue, let me know and I will privately forward you her contact information
I believe everyone deserves a chance to try again, and I hope I can contribute in this way to hers.
I like Angry Black Woman’s suggestion of flooding the SA thread in question with photos of cuteness, although I’m taking the precaution of making myself a new gmail address so the trolls don’t follow me back to my usual haunts. Question for you – if I post cuteness from Flickr sets, is there a danger I’ll be leading the trolls to the doors of the OPs of the cute pictures? I don’t want to inadvertently drag cat-owners into this who know nothing about it.
@moon_custafer, I think I would prefer to set up my own hosting for images I was going to use to spam a troller site, if I were going to do such a thing.
But please see my next post about what I would do about the troller(s) in general if I were moved to do anything at all.
[...] 28th: More interesting coverage on the WisCon troller (includes advice from me to the troller about underestimating your targets and un-heartfelt [...]