Troll or merely brat?

[branchandroot]

Mostly for my curiosity.

Poll #5349 Fannish Pesticides

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

View Respondents

Your immediate response to a commenter who has chosen the user handle "Wandering Beta At Large" is:

View Answers

Troll.
13 (34.2%)

Oh god, not another entitlement-brat.
26 (68.4%)

Free beta-ing, how nice!
2 (5.3%)

Something else I shall mention in the comments.
4 (10.5%)

Your action upon receiving a comment from said user which attempts to "correct" you in some, most likely totally wrong, way:

View Answers

Smack them with a frigidly polite clue-bat and ignore them.
24 (63.2%)

Just ignore them.
14 (36.8%)

Tip off the archive abuse team to what may be a pattern of trollish behavior.
5 (13.2%)

Something else I shall mention in the comments.
4 (10.5%)

Me, I generally do the frigidly polite clue-bat, just to do my bit to discourage fannish idiocy, and move on. It's the user name in particular that is making me contemplate actually contacting the archive in this case, because that seriously rings my troll-alarm.

Comments

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

My response to the poll might be misleading, depending on how egregious the would-be editing had been. If it was something where my grammar was better than the commenter's grammar, I'd go with frigidly polite, probably. Unless I were annoyed enough or sympathetic enough (depending on tone of comment) to go with warmly polite. As in, "Thank you so much, but before you go around telling others that their use of the subjunctive is incorrect, you might want to read up on it. Otherwise you're going to wind up looking silly. You may dislike it and find it old-fashioned and stuffy, but that's an issue of taste, not of English grammar."

If it had been annoying enough, though, I might be tempted to beta the comment. Or tell her that her use of language was so unclear that I was unable to determine what precisely she was attempting to say, although of course it was thoughtful of her to take the time to attempt to say it.

[branchandroot]

*laughs* My freezing reply did, indeed, point out that I don't take advice from strangers whose only claim to beta authority was an evident inability to capitalize or write grammatical sentences, and perhaps this would be a salutary lesson to her/him about "correcting" people uninvited.