John Bokma harassment

[Fred Gilham]

Dale King <"DaleWKing [at]gmail [dot] com"> writes:

> Therefore you do not have the "right" to do what you want with
> Usenet. You have a responsibility to use Usenet in a way that benefits
> the group as a whole (e.g. asking interesting questions that educate
> others).

...or at least, in a way that follows the TOS of your ISP.

The problem is that every time Xah posts, there are dozens and maybe
even hundreds of postings that get provoked.  One might say, "Don't
feed the troll," but it's clear that this spate of posting happens no
matter what anyone says.  It happens in every newsgroup I've ever
read.

It's recognized that trollish behaviour such as cross posting
irrelevant messages to many newsgroups causes this response.  So
instead of whacking dozens or hundreds of people with a clue stick,
which is probably the right thing to do but which is impossible, it's
better to thrash the one who has actually started it all by violating
USENET etiquette in the first place.

Xah's postings are occasionally (*very* occasionally) interesting in a
warped sort of way, but I would much rather see him post pointers to
his web site.  It would be even better if he actually figured out the
groups his messages were relevant to before posting them.

BTW, one time I tried a little social engineering to get rid of an
irrelevant cross-posted thread.  I replied to the messages in the
thread (an irrelevant political thread posted in rec.audio.tubes) with
(somewhat) inflammatory replies but deleted my newsgroup from the
follow-up line.  I kept doing this for a day or two to every message
that showed up in rec.audio.tubes.  The result was that the threads
actually died out pretty fast in that newsgroup.  Unfortunately (but
understandably) people in the other newsgroups got pretty mad and
complained to some authority figure somewhere.  The authority figure
had no authority over me but was nice about it, so I stopped.  I
decided my method was a bad idea.  Or rather, a good idea but
dangerous. :-)

-- 
Fred Gilham                                  gilham at csl.sri.com
``This is mere entertainment featuring fictional characters. No real
human relationships were shattered in the making of this TV series.''