Well I never really looked into how many of the posters are using anonymous
proxies, if many of the OT posters are doing that then yes, it would be a
problem.

I had assumed (without checking) that only the recent extremely abusive
posts were done by anonymous proxies. These abusive posts are clearly a
result of OT petulance spilling out -- remove the OT and those abusive posts
would disappear as they would have no trigger. If that initial premise is
correct then the proxies are a non-issue.

Other than that, the fake e-mail address is no problem, all the info
required to track down a poster is included in the message header. Nobody
would be required to give their real name or email address, there's more
than enough info in your header already.

ISPs getting multiple complaints from whiners is something the ISP will have
to handle themselves, it's not my problem. I'm pretty confident they can
figure it out -- buncha smart people there.

I'm guessing that the policing would only have to happen at the beginning.
I'm also guessing that regardless of the language they use to express
themselves, the people behind those posts are actually decent people. I
would be surprised if one of them were to refuse to take their posts to
another newsgroup.






"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
This should be researched I guess.

My understanding is that ISPs take abuse seriously, they can't really
afford
not to and it's easy enough for them to do. The research would be
provided
by the charter holder and simply double-checked by the ISP staff. The ISP
deals in volume so cutting off one customer is too small a number to have
an
impact on revenue. The poster would then have to get an entirely new
account
with a different ISP. I would think this would be good motivation for not
screwing around.

In fact I would be inclined to think that it would be resolved in the
formal
warning phase.


I'm missing a couple of pages from this chapter. Notice that the most
outrageous
flamers, and some of the most prolific pot stirrers, hide behind phony
screen
names, phony (not just munged) e-mail addresses, etc. How do you report
to anybody?

Requiring that everybody post with a real name and a real e-mail address
would
go a long way toward curing the underlying problem. Not because they would
be
reportable, but because a good number of these people would think twice
about
some of the statements they make if they were actually identifiable with
their
posts.

But such a requirement involves rules, rules demand a judge, etc. If
anybody
can report anybody else to an ISP for posts they aren't pleased with, I'd
hate
to say it but the ISP's will be busy for weeks listening to people from
rec.boats whine about one another.