In no particular order:

1. Retard. (also, tard) Although, I do enjoy the variants of the “tard” theme (tardtastic, tardriffic, tardiness, et al), the plain vanilla insults (e.g. that guild is retarded) are so void of imagination that they are, at their very core, retarded.

2. Lawlz. (either spoken on Vent or typed out thusly) Lawlz had a brief moment as a sarcastic, pity laugh. That moment is over.

3. T.T ;; QQ (weeping smileys) These have infected our guild chat like a pandemic. “I only have 4 Tier 2 T.T” “I lost the random! ;.;” Guess what. I want to /gkick you, T.T.

4. More doooots! Also, 50 DKP Minus! (y’know, spoken in a Pakistani-esque accent during a long boss fight ala the Onyxia guy UPDATE: dead link, refer to the YTMND page instead.) I realize it’s too much to ask that people not shout “More Doooots!” during Onyxia, but every. single. raid. boss. is. too. much.

5. Piccolo of the Flaming Fire. (AE on friendly players: dance) I don’t necessarily HATE this thing at every raid — it’s more like a “FFS, here’s that damn flute again” kind of thing.

6. ZOMG (spoken: “zoh my gawd” usually as if one were a foolish schoolgirl) Just stop. Please. Just stop.

7. Posting on the World of Warcraft realm forums. We’ve had a few “PR issues” as of late — customary for any MMOG guild of some size. The high profilers have “PR disasters”; we have “PR issues”. Enough of us have played other games and know the best approach is public silence and /tells with the injured party because nothing was ever solved via public message boards — no minds have ever been changed by a carefully worded official guild response.

Nonetheless … no matter how often we warn our more vocal members to SHUT UP, no matter how stiff the penalties for responding to trolls, no matter how tight we cinch the muzzles, they cannot stay out of the fray.

Like moths to a flame.