The thing isn't to avoid any thread in which a troll emerges, otherwise an industrious troll with enough time on their hands should shut down every thread on the Mudcat. It's avoiding responding to anything any troll says.

And I'm aware that I tend to get pulled in very easily.

I think that also has to mean avoiding acknowledging or responding to any non-troll who is responding to troll, which means if a thread takes on that quality, it's best to avoid it, or cease posting to it. If it's a subject worth pursuing there is bound to be another thread on the topic, or you can start one.

Once again, I've tended to fall down on that one too.

As for the definition of troll. Mt feeling is that the essential quality is that the intention is to cause a discussion to turn rancorous and bad tempered, as an end in itself. A true troll doesn't really care one way or anther about the issue supposedly under diuscussion.

This doesn't always show up in the initial post, but it normally becomeeds pretty clear soon enough, and there are innumerable ways in which it is achieved by them.

I don't think it is trolling in itself to say something that may be controverisal, or to raise a topic on which there is disagreement. But the aim and the time should always be to get a discussion, and express a real point of view, not to generate a fight. W ought to be saying things we actually believe, or maybe in some cases articulating a point of view that we might not aggree with, but which we genuinely think deserves to be examined.

And all this can in principle happen just as much in music threads as in in music threads, because that is something most of us care a great deal about, and where we have a lot of differences.

I think when we explore our differences and get to understand why it is that other people disagree with things that to us seem blindingly obvious, that can be valuable. It's possible to do that in this forum in ways that are hard or impossible outside it.

And if sometimes posts that I have made have had the effect of turning discussions into arguments and fights, I really am sorry. That has never been my considered intention. I think, like other people, I've probably often enough posted in anger and repented in private.