The Top Ten Most Notorious Posters in Atlas History - Let's make the list...

[Mr. Morden]

How are you defining "controversial"?  Do you mean posters for whom opinion is highly polarized, like opebo?  Because that's different from the posters who everyone hates (like poundingtherock, who I think is the record holder for highest HP %age in an "opinion of" poll).

[Mr. Morden]

Also, what was the deal with poundingtherock again?

He was an uber-Sarah Palin hack who actually wrote articles for the blog "Conservatives4Palin".  He was extremely rude to everyone who disagreed with him (which was everyone), and often accused other posters of being on welfare.

E.g.,

Morgan is completely right.

The people who take offense to it are gay people who somehow believe they are perpetually oppressed by society or their welfare-dependent Democrat Party allies who believe they are oppressed by society.

[Mr. Morden]

OK, well....moderators are inevitably going to be controversial because they have power.  So Inks, for example, has to be in the top ten by your definition of controversial, but that's only because he has moderation powers.

Another category is serial sockmasters, like Atheist2006 and Vegetaboi, who've each made about a million sock accounts.  The moderators deal with those folks all the time, and so would clearly count in any "most controversial among the mods" list, but most of the sock accounts are here for about a day before they get banned, and the wider forum community isn't even aware of them.

As for others who don't fit in those categories, who you haven't already mentioned?  I don't know, I actually think you'd have to include Keystone Phil in that list of possibilities (not necessarily the top 10).  He's well liked enough now, but if we're talking integrated level of controversy over the last 10 years....he's been in a lot of feuds with other people.  For that matter, you should also list Naso.  And then the robot posters, like nkpatel and pbrower2a.  Heck, even "DC united", or whatever her name was, was controversial in her own way.  In that people complained that she didn't belong here, because she didn't actually care about politics.

[Mr. Morden]

Oh yeah, forgot about CARLHAYDEN.  He's definitely a candidate for the long list.

But DWTL was already mentioned in the OP.

[Mr. Morden]

Creating a poll on this now probably isn't going to yield very accurate results, since so many posters here now are recent arrivals.  The results will be skewed towards the present and recent past.

You need an expert panel of posters from throughout Atlas history, in order to get any decent results.  Otherwise it'll be like polling the general public with the question "What is the best movie of all time?", and having the top answer be The Hunger Games.  It's not the sort of question that the general public can answer reliably.

[Mr. Morden]

You need an expert panel of posters from throughout Atlas history, in order to get any decent results.  Otherwise it'll be like polling the general public with the question "What is the best movie of all time?", and having the top answer be The Hunger Games.  It's not the sort of question that the general public can answer reliably.

The Atlas Forum Institute (AFI)'s 10 Years, 10 Trolls list.

Yes, that would be ideal.  Get a panel of Atlas experts, and put together some lists like these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI_100_Years..._series

[Mr. Morden]

Btw, Rochambeau being on this list reminds me of this classic video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSPmMcgGL-w