"John Fereira" wrote in message
.. .
"Wolfgang" wrote in
:


"John Fereira" wrote in message
.. .

If you'd like to rekindle an interest in fly fishing groups on line,
rec.outdoors.fishing.fly is far and away the best place to go.

That was one of the groups I participated in, pretty much from it's
inception. I also proposed and wrote the RFD for
rec.outdoors.fishing.fly.tying. The guy that called me a couple of weeks
ago was also from ROFF. Is Tim Walker still participating on the group?

He shows up from time to time, but doesn't stay long. When I first found
ROFF some five or six years ago he was a regular participant and contributed
much that was worth reading. However, he was (and remains) obsessed by the
catch and release versus catch and kill controversy (coming down heavily on
the side of the latter) and his fixation only got worse with time.
Eventually it got to the point where he became incapable of contributing
more than one or two messages on any topic without his personal demon
forcing the discussion onto the all too familiar track. Of course, none of
this would have been much of a problem if he'd been able to bring in
something new and relevant occasionally, but he couldn't, and there was
never much there to begin with. I suspect you know the type.......it seems
that every newsgroup has got at least one of them.

Meanwhile, despite the frequent and inevitable (and not entirely
unjustified) complaints about the low signal to noise ratio, ROFF does
better than any other unmoderated group I've looked at. Here on RBP, for
example, I see less on topic discussion than I do there. Lest there be any
misunderstanding, this is not a complaint on my part, merely an observation.
As a matter of fact, and as anyone on ROFF can attest, I enjoy a lot of the
off topic stuff much more than endless the repetition of tedious minutiae
and inane controversy that necessarily crops up in a newsgroup which, among
other things, caters to the needs of a steady stream of newbies looking for
guidance, and serves as a soapbox for self-styled savants.

Wolfgang
who remains hopelessly in love with usenet.