🚀 go-pugleaf

gnb@bby.com.au (Gregory Bond):

> That is NOT what I said, and the problem is NOT fixable with
> kill-files, unless EMACS suddenly gets a time-travel module.

The very worst type of spam is the excessively multi posted 
variety (one message, many message ids, perhaps done over a 
period of days).

I've written elsewhere that I can just about cope with having you 
and some of the others dealing with it, especially as you are up 
front about what you cancel, and don't totally hide the articles.

Excessive cross posts (one message, one message id, many groups) 
and posts from "poison" groups are different stories.

It is within my capabilties to decide what is an excessive level 
of crossposting for a particular group and to hide articles that 
exceed those limits.

Ditto the "poison" groups.

No offence to your good works, but I don't need you to deal with 
those problems for me.

You actually do me a disservice if your limits are more
restrictive than mine.

> Go away and think about the problem some more.  Consider the
> multitude of various newsreaders, especially the PC or Mac based
> offline readers that have to download atricles beore deciding to
> kill them.

Should Usenet be cancelled down to the lowest common denominator, 
or should the standards for acceptable reader software be raised?

Killing articles after they have been downloaded seems 
particularly pointless. Why encourage the continued existence of
software that works like that?

Next thing you'll be telling me that there are people who read 
the news without any killfile at all.

What! You mean there actually _are_ some people who don't use a
killfile?

How on earth does anyone put up with reading aus.politics without 
a killfile?

Do you really want to pay by the byte for everything that is 
written there? I don't.

Sometimes the authors flame each other. I guess that is a type of 
"cross" post (8-).

There isn't much spam, and not too much crossposting, so Greg and 
the rest don't have a great deal to say.

Looks like you have to deal with it yourself.

The list of "Top 10" posters to aus.politics is interesting.

4 out of 10 are in my kill file.

If you are a Top 10 poster reading this, don't worry, _you_ 
aren't in my killfile, only the twits are. 8-).

The point?

There is only so much that "central control" can do for you.

Make your own decisions about what should impinge on your 
consciousness.

> Greg, who remembers when USENET was a megabyte a day.

...Dave, who read the Green Card spam via Fidonet.