Margo, motives no but I see a very common method of operation in many of these threads. It doesn't mean that there is only one person trolling but I do think that it is a tried and tested method here in Mucat and it works like this:

1. Set the mood. You do this by using an inflammatory tile, e.g. "Americans are fat", "Rick Feilding Ain't God", etc. This is a great policy and has several advantages in that it attracts attention, causes anger and you know that people will be thinking of the title when they respond (not read the actual message in isolation).

2. Make sure that your message says something which in itself can cast a little doubt over a person or group of people but doesn't actually say what the thread title says. This is great as it catches many out and gives a line of defense for later if required.

3. Keep an eye on the thread at say 5 minute intervals to begin with and where possible, reply to the early posts to "help thing along".

4. When the fire is well and truely burning, sit back and watch or possibly even come back as someone else to defend the missreading of "Guests" initial post and intentions.

One can argue that to ignore is the best policy but unfortunately, for ignoring to work, it needs everyone to ignore and that does not happen. I joined in this one and have stayed out of others but they still carry on and will do until everyone stays out.

As for Dave the Gnome's comments, I am quite convinced that the iniator of this thread was a regular Mudcatter and almost certainly a member. It is kind of hard to imagine that a new person would study the forum closely enough to have a clue about any group of Mudcatter's (apparent) relationship with Rick Fielding.

I am less than certain about knowing who the poster was alhough re-reading the thread does leave me with the impression that Guest did know that his/her cover had been blown or was in danger of being blown. I can only think of one fairly relialble way of doing this from the threads(and even this is not 100% short of checking with an ISP - most are allocated dynamically) which is viewing the IP addresses which is something I believe Max logs. I doubt that this is the case in this instance but oddly enough, Bert is one of the few who visit the Mudcat office where this data would be held.

There are of course other clues but they are less reliable and I think dangerous to speculate over (at least publiclicly) as they could lead to the wrong conclusions. An example of this was I know a Mudcatter who was pretty sure that TTCM=MK. The reason being a peculiar and unique (within MC)usage of &npbs; in the HTML. It is true that you would have to be God to know for sure but there can be give away signs...

Jon