🚀 go-pugleaf

Since John De Armond has seen fit to post E-mail from me to the net
without asking me for permission first (I would have given it if he
had asked, but that's not relevant now), I think I'll share with the
net a message I received recently from him.  I quote:

>This shit is very unbecoming and will backfire on you.  The next such response 
>will automatically be posted back to alt.sources. 
>
>You'd best learn how to mind your own business.

This text above was followed by the inclusion of several copies of the
message from me which John just posted in alt.sources.

Those who have read the text of the message that I sent to John that
he posted know that I go out of my way to be both polite and
informative in it.  The text above, which I got in response, is quite
a contrast.  Not to mention that his E-mail to me said that the *next*
response from me would be posted to alt.sources, but then he went
ahead and posted a *previous* response from me.

I also find it amusing that he accuses me of malfeasance and then
mail-bombs me.  Which is more "unbecoming" to the Usenet as a whole --
sending someone a message asking someone to stop cross-posting
inappropriately, or mail-bombing someone with several repeated copies
of a message?  I think most of us know the answer to this.

In any case, all of this is a preview to the main topic of this
posting, which is how to resolve this dispute between those of us who
are trying to keep alt.sources useful, and those people who think that
we are being assholes.

Since many people have responded to my messages by thanking me, saying
that they didn't realize they were cross-posting to alt.sources, and
that they would be careful not to do so in the future, I continue to
believe that my messages in response to inappropriate messages in
alt.sources are doing some good.  I therefore am reluctant to stop.  I
suspect that others who send out such messages feel the same way.

On the other hand, there are some people who, for whatever reasons,
wish to continue to post non-source postings in alt.sources, even
though they are fully aware of what the newsgroup is for.  It seems
obvious that they are not going to stop either, and that continuing to
point out to them what alt.sources is for every time they post a
non-source posting in it is aproductive and, in some cases (such as in
the case of John De Armond), likely to cause them to escalate things
into obnoxious such as what he's doing.

Therefore, as I told him in what I thought was rather polite E-mail in
response to his vitriolic mail to me, from now on, any time someone
writes to me with any degree of displeasure about my "alt.sources
warnings" to them, I will add them to a list of people who will never
receive such warnings from me in the future.  I am trying to be
helpful by sending out my warnings, not antagonistic; therefore, if I
am going to antagonize someone by sending a warning to them, there's
no reason for me to do it.

I would like to urge anyone else who is sending out such warnings to
do the same thing.  I personally use a script to process a News
posting that I consider inappropriate and send a warning in response
to it; it was therefore easy for me to add a filter to the script to
prevent it from sending warnings to certain people.

I hope we can all stop acting like children.  It's not accomplishing
anything.

There, John, you have your sandbox all to yourself now -- you can post
bogus messages to alt.sources all you want, and I won't flame at you
about it one bit.  Of course, the fact that the sandbox you're trying
to monopolize belongs to the entire net doesn't seem to bother you,
but nothing we say or do is going to change that, so why should we
try, eh?

-- 
Jonathan Kamens                                         jik@MIT.Edu
MIT Information Systems/Athena              Moderator, news.answers