The largest influx of trolls came in 2004, right after the Buckhead incident. A ton of them stayed. They use non-political threads (sports and pop-culture mostly; my favorite troll loves earthquake threads) to make friends and build cred. One thing they’re not here to do is engage in anything remotely resembling honest debate. They try to keep the activism in check, to sow seeds of doubt in potential participants and turn the place into a bickering AOL-type message board rather than a community.
I actually agree with JV. I wish the mods were a little more aggressive with them. I wish it was more difficult to register here, too.