This week on Under the Bridge Reporting, the Techdirt readerbase confirms that once again none of the usual trolls made it into the Insightful or Funny sections, a remarkable track record since John Smith won a spot in the funnies back in 2017 under his My_Name_Here moniker.

That’s not to say the trolls have been careless in their efforts to compete for the title of biggest copyright dumbfuck. Still grieving after Shiva Ayyadurai lost his appeal, Hamilton has been smoking up random threads from DNA databases to subway maps with his typical "GUNS AND WALLS" rhetoric, racking up pretty respectable comment counts that would have made John Smith’s mailing list proud if the ol’ Prenda fanboy was still with us today. More on him later. ROGS has been attempting to follow up on that, having recently cashed in on the strategy of replying to himself via multiple IP addresses, even using a gambit of mimicking users who are signed in, but his inconsistent output and poor attempts to mask himself have left him trailing behind Shiva Ayyadurai’s pro bono PR specialist.

But coming out of nowhere was Tero "Meshpage" Pulkinnen himself, shitting up the Disney+ thread from two weeks ago to an impressive 500+ posts with his mansion fantasies again – this time with some insight into how he thinks copyright and market competition work. Spoiler: His version doesn’t. It really, truly doesn’t. tp has tended to be a bit of an anomaly himself, writing broken English replies to the point where threaded view condenses comments into vertical pillars of illegibility, and despite his madcap maximalist ways he has somehow escaped the blow of the report vote. Which is not something most Zof-flavored trolls can claim, so – congratulations to Tero Pulkinnen for beating the odds in his race to become Techdirt’s biggest cockwaffle.

Speaking of 500+ posts, today we celebrate another week free from blue’s crappy pun pseudonyms. blue has historically been one of the loudest, if not the most effective, of Techdirt’s detractors, doggedly claiming a personal oath to have the site humiliated in the name of Trump… which he managed to carry out on the 2018 Devin Nune’s memo thread before petering out without so much as a whimper, a few months after his pet project passed the half-thousand mark. Goodness knows where blue is today given that he had no reason to leave. Could it be a new golden age of 2014 after blue had enough of Prenda’s tactics getting them into worse trouble, and went on hiatus for a year? Somehow I doubt it, seeing that the dumbass saw fit to come back in 2015 when the news against Prenda was deteriorating.

blue honestly deserves a separate roasting report on his own, though this does allow us to segue into the aforementioned John Smith, also known as a variety of names such as The Anti-Mike, Whatever, MyNameHere, Just Sayin’ – but more famously, "horse with no name" when he was posting his support for John Steele, as well as "bobmail" and "fitta" while he was fellating Paul Hansmeier on Torrentfreak before Andrew Norton had enough of his garbage. Why the segue? John Smith has not been definitively sighted in recent weeks, the same way as blue, and some like Scary Devil "Bobmailslayer" Monastery have proposed that blue and "Jhon" are one and the same. It’s a theory vaguely hinted by Masnick to be more accurate than people suspect, which this reporter personally doesn’t – given the different disappearing times, and sufficiently varied posting styles of the two trolls that come in different flavors of batshit-fucking-insane.

Still, John Smith’s ramblings over the years have provided a good laugh, particularly during Masnick’s New Year’s messages where John rants and raves at the fact that the site exists, pisses off, then comes back with another crappy username. John’s decision to skip out on 2019’s message is surprising, but considering his increased difficulty in staying unknown, given how his rants about "shortening the length of copyright from lifetime + 70 to lifetime + 50 would incentivize murdering content creators" are easy to pick out from a mile away, the difficulty in remaining an Anonymous Coward on his own terms might have been just too hard for the Prenda fanboy to bear. Only time will tell if John Herrick Smith decides to make a comeback, but in this reporter’s opinion he’ll eventually get tired of crying salty tears into his Keith Lipscomb body pillow.

And rounding off tonight’s report on Techdirt trolls, we have another returning favorite, Richard "Dick Bent" Bennett! He hasn’t been sighted on Techdirt often, which is fair considering his duties as Ajit Pai’s damage control department, but he rarely passes up a chance to scream at leftists and pirates. He’s made an appearance at… Ars Technica, of all places, which is surprising given his greater loathing for the site’s favorable view towards net neutrality. Bennett was seen screaming at Ars Technica posters for daring to complain about Frontier charging users rental fees for their own devices… because the company declared bankruptcy. The idea that paying executives exorbitant amounts of money instead of providing decent customer service is still a nuance lost on ol’ Dickface, apparently, who hasn’t seemed to have caught a break despite the death of TItle II.

That’s all for tonight’s report. Tune in next time for your recommended dose of copyright schadenfreude!