Renaming this group...

[Rohit Seth]

I'm rather new to this group... and I can't help thinking this :
"With so many references to this person called Alan Erskine, this group's
posts pretty much are pretty much being dominated by this person or about
this person. So should this group be renamed to the Alan Erskine Group?"

And what's ironic is that it seems to have membes who really are
knowledgable about the topic of the group. So.........what went wrong?

Just my 2 canadian cents...

Rohit

[John Beaderstadt]

I was reading in the bathroom when I ran across an item written by
"Rohit Seth" > on Sun, 03 Aug 2003 15:13:44 GMT,
which said:

>I'm rather new to this group... and I can't help thinking this :
>"With so many references to this person called Alan Erskine...

Before you make any judgments about Alan, consider that anything
written about him by an anonymous author should be given pretty much
the same credence as you would give any other anonymous author. Also,
Alan has been victimized by a lot of retaliatory forged posts, and can
hardly be held responsible for the content of those forgeries. His
big sin was in trying to hold an asshole accountable for his claims
regarding the Challenger accident.


---------------
Beady's Corollary to Occam's Razor: "The likeliest explanation of any phenomenon is almost always the most boring."

[Fred Garvin]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 11:13:44 -0400, Rohit Seth wrote:

> I'm rather new to this group... and I can't help thinking this : "With so
> many references to this person called Alan Erskine, this group's posts
> pretty much are pretty much being dominated by this person or about this
> person. So should this group be renamed to the Alan Erskine Group?"
>
> And what's ironic is that it seems to have membes who really are
> knowledgable about the topic of the group. So.........what went wrong?
>
> Just my 2 canadian cents...
>
> Rohit


Set up your newsreader filters to ignore the morons posts.

[John Beaderstadt]

I was reading in the bathroom when I ran across an item written by
Fred Garvin > on Sat, 09 Aug 2003 08:30:54 -0400,
which said:

>Set up your newsreader filters to ignore the morons posts.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll again mention that
it's also helpful to get a dedicated filtering program. Netscape's
own filters are almost worthless, and Agent can still filter only on
subject and author; this leaves you helpless against the assholes that
like to morph. A program such as nfilter/NewsProxy, therefore, is an
almost essential add-on, since its filtering is almost completely
open-ended, able to filter on virtually any string in any header. It
also supports scoring, for the filtering sophisticate (I'm currently
trying to learn this technique).

I find that filtering out anything posted to more than two groups cuts
out at least 50% of the crap, and Agent's subject-author filters take
care of the rest. Just in case, I also have a second filter written
specifically for anonymous posts since, in my experience, remailers
are used exclusively for trolling and personal attacks.
Interestingly, all of the anonymous posts have so far been caught by
my crossposting filter, and the remailer filter has thus never been
needed. This probably says something about the people who use
remailers.

BTW, it also probably says something that posts by the *real* Alan
Erskine do get through my filters, but the sporgeries written in his
name and/or about him do not (I have to go to Google to see what's
going on). So far, I've seen no reason to killfile Alan, especially
since he appears to have calmed down. I don't agree with him a lot of
the time, but honest disagreement is part of the authentic reason for
usenet's existence.


---------------
Beady's Corollary to Occam's Razor: "The likeliest explanation of any phenomenon is almost always the most boring."