Trolls are small, pudgy, genital-free humanesque figures that were a momentarily interesting phenomena. They were also cute little dolls when I was a kid. Some trolls, however are worse then others. As Wired reports, the trolls on AutoAdmit.com, a college-admissions discussion board, are wannabe lawyers with extremely small genitals and extremely large inferiority complexes who think appropriate posts include statements like "Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped" and rants about sexual histories that, had they paid more attention in class than to the women who won't fuck them, they might have recognized as libelous or threatening in a prosecutable way. So, they're being sued by two legally anonymous Yale Law students whose reputations — and careers — were tarnished by the nasty and false postings.Of course, I'm a girl and I write on the Internet, so I've had my share of trolls. One man stalked my posts across Wonkette when I started, repeatedly commenting on my weight, my ugliness and my stupidity. Finally, he gave me an excuse when he called me a "fat fag hag" on a comment thread, so I banned him. To my surprise and delight, he emailed my bosses and cc'd me with an incredibly angry response, repeating his charges about my weight, my fag-haggery and my non-existent writing skills. It might have been sort of hurtful, if he hadn't used his work email address to do so. We had a good laugh over that lawyer's smarmy and overweight mug on his company's website, and, when he continued to email me threats, a lawyer friend of mine did a helpful little background check on him for me to make sure he was just a small little impotent man who hated women. He was! (He also hates cops and did a little jail time for reckless driving, but he was just the sort of person who got his rocks off by belittling other people "anonymously" so I stopped worrying about him.) So, are there legal issues to the case? I'm not a lawyer, but it does sound like it's kind of becoming a clusterfuck. But if it puts the fear of God into the type of people who think that physical threats and libelous statements are all okay on the internet because it's "anonymous," then I'm all for a little fear in the troll class. They're giving the dolls a bad name. Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora's Box [Wired]