Harry,
If anyone can take responsibility for the tone of rec.boats, it is you.


"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
wrote:
Milky-G wrote:

Obviously, this isn't the newsgroup I thought it was. This must be

the

political ranting, ego bashing, off topic forum that I thought I

already

unsubscribed from last week. My mistake.


The title is deceiving. Years ago this was a boating newsgroup.
Today, most of the frequent posters to the NG are non-boaters.
Most of the so called "threads" are just blatant political trolls, and
lately one group of like-minded individuals sharing a common poliltical
and philosophical view of the world have specialized in launching
threads for the sole purpose of name calling and other juvenile
behavior.

Nobody would seriously expect a newcomer to hang around here. The
boating aspect of rec.boats is dead as a doornail. When somebody makes
a boating related statement, he or she can expect long-winded, mean
spirited responses from people who disagree on the subject but who
cannot express their contrary opinion in a civil, responsible tone.

This NG is becoming a toilet. No point hanging around hoping it will
get better, as some of the perpetrators have publicly expressed, in
this forum, that their goal in rec.boats NG is to screw it up as badly
as they can.

Worse yet, nearly all are gulty of at least some bad behavior- myself
included.
Get the heck out of the asylum while there's still time. Flee for your
life, man!



I think you've understated the problem, Chuckster.


There are about a half-dozen posters here who either never post about a
boating topic or do so so infrequently that I cannot recall their last
on-topic "contribution."

Now, off-topic posting doesn't offend me. I'm as guilty as anyone of this.
I either read an off-topic post or I don't.

It is the viciousness of some of these posters I find obnoxious. So
obnoxious that I have filtered most of them out. They are here solely as
attack dogs, as far as I can tell. I believe their purpose in showing up
here is to destroy this newsgroup. They're pretty much succeeded.

We also have two infrequent posters here who start nearly violent
arguments on on-topic matters with almost every post. One, a sailboater,
argues minor issues to the point of nauseum. The other gets off by posting
incredible long and horribly written psychotic screeds about those on that
individual's "s-list."

Within these groups are a couple of individuals who log on here solely to
create problems of some sort for those they do not like. If there is a
lower life form on usenet, I'm unaware of it.

I don't spend much time here anymore. When I take breaks from work and
want to read a bit on subjects that interest me, or engage in reasonable
discourse, I head to places where there are fewer droolers.

I don't know if this newsgroup can recover.