Trolls and hackers can kill

Suzi Pritchard went through two failed marriages before she pushed on her talent for writing.

She became a freelance journalist and was published in many national publications - she had articles published in every section of the Guardian newspaper.

When MSN was launching their communities in the 1990’s, she was personally asked if she would run a showcase community, and so she set up The PleasureDome for Writers to help aspiring writers develop their talents.

By 2004 she found MSN communities too constrictive, and set up Dome2 on the wider internet, and founded a co-operative funded by Arts Council grants to run the project.

(Personally I think the site looks awful, but was built by Bll Luthor - a close friend of Suzi’s - who died shortly after from emphysema, and she was loathe to change it.)

I volunteered free services to install and manage software on the site while the Dome2 Co-operative got on with the real work of fostering writing talent.

Then they got themselves a troll.

A really extreme troll at that.

Forum trolls are essentially people who seek to disrupt a site’s functioning, either by attacking the community or else the site directly.

This troll - a particularly nasty piece of work from Northern Ireland - was especially vindictive and abusive in attacking the community members.

Unfortunately, Suzi always tried to be understanding, and tried to talk him round to behaving reasonably. When she exhausted herself doing that, she finally had no choice but to ban him.

Then the fireworks really began.

He accused the co-operative of stealing his work, by leaving it posted on their forums.

He accused the co-operative of stealing his work, when *he* deleted it from their forums.

He refused to copy/paste any work from the forums, because he was now claiming intellectual rights on the HTML code on the forum itself.

He then proceeded to collect telephone numbers and addresses of the site staff and began an email campaign publishing them in what can only be described as a malicious and defamatory attack.

He then claimed to have been phoning up the funding bodies for the Dome2 co-operative to try and have their funding cancelled.

This went on for a month or so.

Suzi had been diagnosed with a heart murmur 4 years previously. She now suffered a heart attack.

Even while hospitalised the troll continued with his hate campaign.

And then the CPanel exploit occured and a script kiddie uploaded a Hacked message in an index.html file.

There was no damage otherwise to the site and normal service, and the message was removed.

Suzi saw it and thought her troll had found how to destroy her site project via the server.

Last Saturday, Suzi underwent further surgery, but died of heart failure on the operating table.

I have no doubt in my mind that both the troll and hacking incidents help speed up her death.

The internet offers easy anonymity, and some people abuse this for kicks.

Point of this post is - those kicks hit real people, with real lives. And sometimes it kills them.