There is no anonymity on the Internet

Well, at least in the U.S. there really isn’t. This morning around 2 AM EDT a troll followed me from a topic on the WordPress forums from Denver, Colorado.

He’d poked around for about 30 minutes with his Android tablet using Firefox (likely from his parents basement) and left a racist contact form submission about my wife and how I “struck out with pretty white girls and ended up in the bottom of the social barrel”.

There’s something really sad and pathetic about someone posting that from their parent’s basement after midnight their local time.

None of that bothers me; trolls on the Internet have been around forever. I’ve heard that in the work place (though that was 20 years ago) and hey, it’s the Internet.

Had he left anything remotely threatening then instead of a blog post I’d be preserving log data for law enforcement and making some calls this morning.

What irks me is when a plugin developer follows me home to continue an argument or leave a “<EXPLETIVE DELETED> YOU!” message. When that happens I don’t get angry but I do get disappointed. It doesn’t happen often as most WordPress developers are cool.

Troll are bad. WordPress developers losing their mind? More sad than anything else. I expect people who contribute to the community to be better than that. 😉