werner@utastro.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) (10/31/88)
In article <16216@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, weemba (Obnoxious Mat) writes: | In article <2074@lll-lcc.llnl.gov>, drp@lll-lcc (David Preston) writes: | | >I think most of us would agree that there is a small subset of posters | >to this group whose postings go beyond mere differences in viewpoint | >and ideology and are, in fact, offensive. We may not agree .... | >..... So I'm asking that if you must reply to | >offensive postings, simply put the posters name in the subject heading, | >so that automatic filters will catch it. > A simple solution I'd like to see would be a standardized In-reply-to > header, allowing KILL files to deal with this quite simply. I'm also > thinking of a more general solution for Gnews I call super-KILL, where > so-and-so's articles trigger brand new KILLs based on their Message-IDs. > I have, in the past, killed off whole sites to KILL based on Message-IDs. > This is obviously not the correct thing to do. .... not correct? I wouldn't go that far! sad, maybe ... yeach!! all this effort and contortion to deal with a few obnoxious bozos. I'm looking forward to the day when moderated groups are the norm; We don't have to eliminate unmoderated groups, but simply share the load of identifying (and otherwise ignoring) worthless articles. Right now, we don't have the software support to do that, and the only response available to overload of quantity and (lack of) quality is unsubscribing from a group. online history has not shown one failure of the moderator-concept that I can think of, either in the preferable (because more readable) digest format, or in the Approved-for-distribution style (though I would not go as far as excluding such a failure) If I was certain that by summarizing and digesting ONE group, my increased effort here would be recompensed by others in doing the same for other groups (thus making it possible for all to keep track of more topics in less time, without the daily dose of stomach-ills brought on by the bozos), I'd be at it already. if, at least, 2 others would volunteer to participate in a test run, where each takes on creating a daily/weekly summary of one group, I think my point would be validated very quickly; we could exchange the resulting digests by mail and/or post them, and the world might follow in our footsteps. If I was given the choice to read a daily summary of news.* prepared by almost anyone on this net, I would quickly ignore all other articles in news.* (and so would a large percentage of most readers), and bozos could be 'safely ignored' by most, and would only get in kind responses from other bozos ... pretty soon the moderator could invite people to submit their articles by email directly rather than posting, reducing the individual article-traffic and moderating load significantly; anyone unhappy with a moderator's decisions would be free to post, no new groups would be required, though one might want to create ONE special group for "summaries and digests" only, where all digests could be cross-posted, making it possible to ignore traffic in most groups completely.... -- --------------------> PREFERED-RETURN-ADDRESS-FOLLOWS <--------------------- (ARPA) werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu (Internet: 128.83.144.1) (INTERNET) werner%rascal.ics.utexas.edu@cs.utexas.edu (UUCP) ..!utastro!werner or ..!uunet!rascal.ics.utexas.edu!werner