Profiling.

The user is almost certainly building profiles of other users. He does this based upon disclosures board members already make, and likely runs another glove-puppet handle for making offsite contact with some of them. The nick you are responding to is a "throwaway" intended to provoke some of these users into volunteering "supplementary information", while appearing to be a different person with random, incidental interests. The users who volunteer information are known in the trade as "low-hanging fruit", and the intention of the bait is very much to be an obvious "troll", or at least appear that way to most users. Think about it, if it takes a lot of effort to convince your target to volunteer information, you are going to run into trouble getting them to volunteer further information. There is literally no point looking smart, if you are trying to get people to volunteer information. This is the philosophy followed by Nigerian scammers among others.