richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (09/19/88)
To the members of Usenet:
Hello. There has emerged, what we feel to be a huge problem. For
a while now, the net has been plagued with postings from several
"people" at the Portal System (tm) in California. The postings are
made from ambiguous accounts such as "Spartan", "Hijacker", "Argent",
"ANKH" etc, ad nauseum. It is our opinion that the Site Administrator's
decision to let subscribers use these "handles" (and apparently change
them at will) encourages some of them to post irresponsibly, and perhaps
not use the best of judgement when doing it. I offer as a "for instance"
the fairly recent incident of "jj@cup.portal.com" who posted a plea for
money across the entire net, cross-posting to most of the newsgroups.
This problem might be solved if the management at the Portal System would
simply replace or augment the "XPortal-User-Id:" line with the (l)user's
real name. This situation would perhaps force a poster to use more
discretion prior to posting, knowing that his or her *real* name would
be attached to the posting.
If the Site Administrators at the Portal System are still uncertain as
to whether or not they should implement such a thing, perhaps those of
us who feel this way could help them out by assembling as complete a
portfolio of these postings as possible. Then, mail them to
'root@cup.portal.com' along with your comments as to why you feel
the postings are inappropriate. This will aid their staff in resolving
the problem by presenting them with *complete* first-hand evidence.
I thank you, and Usenet thanks you. It's your net. Do it now.
--
Life is fishforks.
richard@gryphon.CTS.COM {backbone}!gryphon!richard