In a nut shell, a troll will post a bait message to some newsgroup and
crosspost it to a scoring group. The troll and friends will hang out
in the scoring group and count the number of responses to the bait.
The more responses, the higher the score. It's an inexpensive game
anyone can play :-)

Now, there are at least two ways to view these trolls. Either you
dislike what they are doing as matter of principle and don't want to
give them the satisfaction of a high score and so you leave out the
scoring group when (if) you reply to the thread. Or else you value
their input or at least the discussions that they start and you leave
the scoring group in in order to reward the "good" trolls, hoping that
this will lead to some sort of Darwinian selection process to improve
the quality of the troll population.

Both views have their merits. I would advise leaving out scoring for
the trolls that succeed in creating flame threads but perhaps
rewarding those that tend to generate interesting debates. So if this
thread degenerates into a War On Terror flame fest, leave it out but
if it spins off interesting sub-threads about writing controversial
software, leave it in :-)

Cheers
    Bent D