Yes, this was a case of large-scale trolling, all apparently by the same person.
I just nuked the accounts from orbit, so to speak. They originated from the same IP address, as far as I can tell, and they only stopped when that IP address was blocked automatically by the system, which happened about five hours ago.
A few things to keep in mind if you see this in the future:
- Do not edit any of the posts to change content. This may only confuse future flaggers. There's also a bot that checks for spam and offensive posts, and it may not see some of these posts if keywords are edited out. Flag, vote to delete, downvote, and move on.
- Don't hesitate to use the rude/abusive flag. Nonsense is one of the cases it should be used for. Six such flags will delete the post; this happened in the case of the question you linked. Also, don't hesitate to use the custom mod flag to let us know that there might be a problem, but preferably use rude/abusive.
- This was a relatively unsophisticated attempt. The accounts only stemmed from one IP, and once that was blocked, the person gave up (it seems). In the future, it could be worse.
Thanks for letting us know, and thanks to everyone for flagging. At the time, no mods were around, so community flagging and deleting was absolutely needed, and people did the right thing (though again, more rude/abusive flags are always great). This is now under control.
There was actually a previous, smaller round of trolling two hours before this last one. I've dealt with that, too.