🚀 go-pugleaf

Phil Herring <revdoc@uow.edu.au> wrote:

> Nobody cares what you think. You incite off-topic flamewars, you
> piss people off, then you cry when someone takes the bat away
> from you. Well, gee, I guess Usenet isn't your personal
> playground, after all!

> (Of course, if you post your flames to aus.flame, nobody would
> care, because that's what aus.flame is for; but I don't expect
> you to work that out.)

Thanks for the free advice Phil. Funny thing is that I didn't
participate in the flamewar.

I did however comment on a classic piece of Doublespeak in which 
you claimed that:

> The thread that started with the subject "France is a great
> country" is off-topic for aus.general, and is now being
> auto-cancelled.
[...]
> This is not censorship, and is only 'content-based' in the
> sense that the thread is clearly not within the charter of
> aus.general.

Off-topic is content.
Rude and obnoxious is content.
Not within the charter is content.

You then proceded to cancel messages in the thread (well, only
those written by a particular author) and claimed:

> This cancellation has been performed with the consent
> of the regular readers of this group.

>>How did you obtain the consent of the regular readers of this
>>group?

>The charter gets posted every other week. Nobody has objected
>to it as yet.

The charter is all of six paragraphs long, and most of it is 
devoted to what not to do. It even mentions cancels for excessive 
crossposts.

The charter does not mention cancels for off-topic, rude or any 
other cause - just crossposts.

It may be that the readers do want aus.general to be a 
retrospectively moderated group. Fine, get it into the charter. 

Or better, create a real moderated group so that people who 
respect your judgement as to topic and style need not be 
subjected to the depredations of this month's ratbag poster.

In the meantime, could I suggest that you either leave the 
content based cancels alone, or drop the "with the consent of the 
group" bit from your cancels.

...Dave