John: yes, it is a nuisance, and as it's an unmoderated group, there's not
much we can do about it.

Your news reader program will have filters which you can configure to ignore
keywords or particular senders whom you find egregious.

But I find I can do a quick scan through the messages and pick out the few
boating topics which might interest me. I rarely even read the other stuff
(this message being an exception!). Responding to non-boating material, and
especially getting into contests of who said what when and are they really
an idiot, I find completely unproductive. Responding to those people in any
manner whatsoever only feeds them, and the only way to defeat them is to
ignore them. Sometimes this requires swallowing one's ego temporarily.

Outlook Express can mark certain threads as "interesting," and then I follow
those, and ignore any starting with "" if I didn't mark them at the
beginning of the thread. Then I only look for new thread topics. Very fast.

Type "newsgroup etiquette" or "netiquette" into a search engine, and all
your questions will be answered.

In the meantime ... how's your boating going? Do you have any one burning
issue you would like to present to the group? (I suggest a new, re-titled
thread for that.)

Charles

====

Charles T. Low
- remove "UN"
www.boatdocking.com/BDPhoto.html - Photo Contest
www.boatdocking.com
www.ctlow.ca/Trojan26 - my boat

====

"John Smith" wrote in message
...
What's with all the non-boat material?

JS