What To Do When The Zombie Chickens Come For You

There you are, minding your own business when, next thing you know, you're in the midst of a hijacking. It's malicious, counter productive, and makes you /frown. Your attempt to put out some positive energy and entertainment into your particular gaming community has been corrupted by a foul soul who's only thrill in life, as pathetic as that may be, is to obliterate your thread by hijacking it. They start out seemingly on topic, but it's really just the beginning of the brush fire. Before long your once brilliant thread that brought people together is overrun with talk of zombie chickens or how much people love Joan Cusack. It's wrong and destructive on various levels.

Thread hijackers are playing a game with the forums because they have nothing constructive to add to the conversation, but desperately need everyone's attention. The truly insidious ones will attempt to make you believe that you somehow asked for them to completely alter the topic at hand. They would be wrong of course, because if you had wanted to discuss the zombie chickens the entire thread would have started out talking about them, and even been titled “talk about zombie chickens here”. Stop projecting you vicious hijacker!

Similar to the thread hijacker is the guild chat troll. They operate in much the same way, with the minor exception that the chat troll usually has a very good poker face. If you can have a poker face in text, that is. No one can ever really tell when the chat troll is joking or serious. Which is normally what they are banking on in order to start the chat riot they are looking for.

Everyone in guild chat will be discussing how much the quest to collect 13 left monkey rib bones sucks and how the drop rate is irritatingly low considering all of them appear to not only have left ribs, but several of them. However only one in five is giving you one to carry around in your bag (which hopefully has some zip-locks in it to store them or things could get messy). It will be at this point that the chat troll will mention how much monkey's suck, and it seems like a rather innocuous thing to say given the topic at hand. It's the next part that will send everyone into a chat flurry, and it's usually something like “all monkeys should be extinctified in favor of preventing monkey suckery”. Then all hell breaks loose and some people log off in protest of monkey slaughter, and other people are discussing the best way to kill the monkeys off. It's anarchy at it's most pixelated.

Another guild community bane is the VOIP hog. This person has a glaring lack of considerate behavior and basic manners which allows him to dominate any channel he enters. Members will discuss in private tells how they loathe when he enters the channel because they can never get a word in. The hog doesn't seem to understand that he is playing with real people that have their own thoughts and would maybe enjoy the occasional break in your tirade of trivial chatter to express them.

Strangely, the hog gets offended if you should ask him to try not to deluge people with his vacuous words. He will then talk even more to try and prove that he shouldn't have to change a thing, and possibly go so far as to suggest that the problem isn't him, it's everyone else. Which is more proof that crazy people never know they are crazy.

Interestingly, guilds as a community tolerate these maddening social terrorists for some rather unclear reasons. Is it that every village needs it's fool? Maybe it's that the people with the proper sway to alter this atrocious behavior are hoping it will correct itself? Or perhaps it's that deep-down we are all afraid that we will be the next one weeded out of the system?

Regardless of the reasons, these are relatively minor infractions, and even if you rid yourself of your current flock of zombie chickens new ones will hatch. So what do you do when the zombie chickens start pecking at you? Don't feed them, noob.

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