In article , Stephen Trapani wrote:
cavelamb wrote:
alt.usenet.kooks.

The vandals of the internet!

So, no, this newsgroup is probably not viable any more.

The only thing that will make it not viable is if people like you, who
like to post and read cruising info, start believing it is not viable
and you quit using it. If you let these kooks convince you of that, they
win.

I second that.

I logged on this morning (UK, so after all the Americans posted
yesterday evening), and I saw four threads, and no spam. If 'kooks' are
making your (Cavelamb) time in this group in-viable then you need to
beef up your filters/kill-file.

I hate it when newsgroups 'die'. Mainly because I hate web-formums so
much. There are just too many to follow, and often enough they're run by
the Gestapo who'll ban you if they don't like your opinion, or you
disagree with theirs. No, usenet is the *only* place for free and open
discussion, don't let the 'kooks' win.

Justin.

--
Justin C, by the sea.

Justin C wrote:
In article , Stephen Trapani wrote:
cavelamb wrote:
alt.usenet.kooks.

The vandals of the internet!

So, no, this newsgroup is probably not viable any more.
The only thing that will make it not viable is if people like you, who
like to post and read cruising info, start believing it is not viable
and you quit using it. If you let these kooks convince you of that, they
win.

I second that.

I logged on this morning (UK, so after all the Americans posted
yesterday evening), and I saw four threads, and no spam. If 'kooks' are
making your (Cavelamb) time in this group in-viable then you need to
beef up your filters/kill-file.

I hate it when newsgroups 'die'. Mainly because I hate web-formums so
much. There are just too many to follow, and often enough they're run by
the Gestapo who'll ban you if they don't like your opinion, or you
disagree with theirs. No, usenet is the *only* place for free and open
discussion, don't let the 'kooks' win.

Justin.

I 'third' that. Web forums are a royal PITA and many of them get
seriously spammed. It takes *far* longer to find the worthwhile posts
under the layer of anonymous tinned meat than it does here. When we get
flooded, there is usually a common pattern that allows automatic
filtering to be 99% effective. Finding a web forum sysop with enough of
a clue on IT issues to be able to filter effectively and responsively is
*rare*.

[RANT] Clueless sysops are more common, a case in point being a class
association forum where the Sysop has block deleted all messages over 2
years old *WITH* *NO* *BACKUP* as he felt that old event announcements
cluttered the forum and someone had told him that the forum software is
suspected to have problems with too many posts in its database in spite
of the fact that the total annual traffic on that forum is less than a
month's worth on other sites running the same software so we could have
carried on as was for some 12 to 24 years without running into the bug
*IF* *IT* *EVEN* *EXISTS*. [/RANT] As a result, the class has lost a
valuable technical archive of discussion of rule changes, boat tuning,
maintenance etc. and its also lost at least one member as I have decided
not to renew my sub.

Web forums are also at the mercy of their hosting and owner/sponsor so
tend to be short lived in USENET terms.

I could go on, but this is probably not the best place to do so ...

To sum up, USENET is broken but less so than Web Forums in general and
there are plenty of ways of keeping USENET usable available to the end
user.
--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & 32K emails -- NUL:

In article , IanM wrote:

[snip]

I could go on, but this is probably not the best place to do so ...

Phew! And I thought *I* got p****d off at web forums!

Long live usenet!

Justin.

--
Justin C, by the sea.

Stephen Trapani wrote:


The only thing that will make it not viable is if people like you, who
like to post and read cruising info, start believing it is not viable
and you quit using it. If you let these kooks convince you of that, they
win.

Well put. I also agree that the annoyers are easy to spot based no
message content. There are the occasional world wide spammers which
infect every ng until the ISP's learn to filter them out but the ones
under discussion here can either be played for fun or easily ignored.

For all I know, there is but one or two with a seemingly infinite amount
of time and socks.