🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 11 Oct 1998, Masataka Noda wrote:

> Hi.  What's BI ?? 
> 
> thanks in advance.

It means that you, Masataka Noda, are a moron.

Someone mentions something that you are unfamiliar with, and not only do
you start another thread to find out what it means, but you add two other
newsgroups to the cross-posting.  None of the four newsgroups,
mtl.general, can.general, concordia.general and mcgill.general have
anything to do with topic.  If you replied to a thread, one could
accept that you were asking about BI because it had already come up here
(and it came up because people were already cross-posting too much).  But
if you feel the need to ask generally what the term means, then I'd
suggest you take the time to figure out the appropriate newsgroup (I
don't happen to know the most relevant newsgroup, but I would guess
very strongly that it would have "abuse" somewhere in the name) and ask
there.  But you can't be bothered doing that, so you simply post to
a bunch of newsgroups, as you routinely do, and create cascading problems
as a result.

I should point out that Rich Lafferty made his comments about your BI
level and limited the cross-posting to the concordia and mcgill
newsgroups, even though the offending post was cross-posted to 3 or 4
others.
 
Harry Hill made a comment about one of these threads you've created, and
had the decency to limit it to the concordia and mcgill newsgroups.  You,
in typical fashion, decided it was "way too important" to limit to
these two newsgroups, and so you added two or three more for your reply.

Recently in mtl.general you replied to someone's post that was only in
that newsgroup, and added a bunch more newsgroups.

You also picked up at least one post in some newsgroup and then replied to
it by cross-posting to some extra newsgroups.  It's bad enough that you
are doing it, but it's often to add a non-sensical single line comment.

Although you finally seem to have cut back, you have repeatedly in the
past cross-posted to a slew of newsgroups in the rec.radio.amateur.*
hierarchy each time you post, often including other newsgroups outside the
hierarchy to the mix.

You had some thread going that had some newsgroup with "immigrant" in the
title, and finally someone from that newsgroup complained that it had no
relevance to the topic of that newsgroup, and indeed it was true.

In your quest to post to as many newsgroups as possible, you've at times
posted to non-existent newsgroups.  You don't even have a clue 
about the workings of the newsgroups, so you assume because it
exists on your server that it's a real newsgroup.  And of course there
will be messages in there if you cross-post to them, but that doesn't mean
it's a real newsgroup.

Recently you were passing out "newsgroup tips" in mtl.general.  You
warned someone not to cross-post to too many newsgroups, because the
message would get cancelled.  But then you added that the way to get
around it is to post the message to a number of newsgroups separately.

Obviously you don't have a clue.  Both paths are equally bad.  In one
case, cross-posting, you barge into very different newsgroups and are more
than likely to annoy someone in one of those newsgroups.  In the other
case, multiple posting, you end up where you may get some replies, but
the different replies are never seen by the repliers in the other
newsgroups. In terms of resources, multiple posts are more wasteful than
cross-posting.  But there is rarely a valid reason to post in more than
one group, and very rarely any reason to post to more than two newsgroups.

You just assume that your message is important (and I would debate the
importance in most cases), and then assume that because it's "important"
it must be posted to a large number of newsgroups.

The simple fact is that you can't be bothered looking for the appropriate
newsgroup, so you consistently cross-post in the hopes of getting a
response. 

The internet is not some Wizard of Oz figure somewhere out in the
stratosphere making dictatorial rules and decisions.  It all in some way
has something to do with community, which the internet supports by it's
ability to connect people horizontally, rather than vertically (such as
traditionally networking where one person holds the address book and thus
has an element of control).  Somebody saw something that could be
improved, or didn't like the way something was being done, or sees
something that the internet allows, and creates some softeware to do it
or writes a FAQ or sets standards by virtue of writing them.  If your
software won't let you post to more than a certain number of newsgroups
at a time, it's because the community has decided there is no need,
and then a member of the community puts the limit in the software.
If you post to too many newsgroups, and your message gets cancelled,
it's because community standards has decided that there should be limits
on  cross-posting.

In some cases, community standards are set by the community; you can find
newsgroups in really great shape because there is a sense of community and
thus people work together to keep the newsgroup clean.  In other cases,
community standards are set by a sub-group of the community.  All the
sites where newsgroups flow to agree to set aside disk space for the
newsgroups; and while things have changed in recent years, traditionally
each site has helped to pass on messages to the next site. So the news
administrators, in effect a "community" of people aware of the cost and
resources needed for the newsgroups, decide on what the standards are.  

One of the things about community is it dosn't happen if you come barging
in.  People seem to think that spam is something that came in with the
internet.  But twenty years ago I'd go to hear out of town speakers talk
against nuclear power and weapons, and inevitably the communists would
show up.  When it came time for questions, they would get up and give
their speeches.  They weren't there because of nuclear power, pro or con,
they were there to promote their own "important topic" even though 
the people who were there for the topic didn't want to hear the communists
spew.  On the other hand, some communists did learn, because a friend in
Boston told me a few years ago that a friend of his who was a communist
had taken up baseball as a means of reaching out to people.

And community doesn't happen if you are one-dimensional.  Endless-debating
tends to be one-dimensional, even if the topics do change.  It's only with
time, and with the slow revealing of things that matter to you, that
community happens.

So if all you have to add to a newsgroup is endless debating, then people
will have less interesting in wanting to like you.  If you don't
contribute original information to the newsgroup, there will be less
interest in answering any questions that you might have, or in being
friendly to you.  If you aren't investing in community, putting things in
a newsgroup that will help to make the newsgroup interesting so others
will stick around and maybe add something when they have something they
can add, then don't expect to be able to draw on that community at some
point down the line.

Cross-posting tends to violate community.  You have no interest in the
people already there, you don't really care what they are already talking
about, but you think your message is so important that you can barge in on
the newsgroup.  It's no wonder that that cross-posting tends to create
nasty replies.  You aren't there except for the purpose of the message,
so you miss out on the other messages that may in fact help to build
community, and the newsgroup regulars miss out on messages with real
content that might say something about you and give them reason to like
you.

Now you've started wondering how big the readership of mtl.general (as you
did a week or two ago), and how big the readership of the concordia and
mcgill newsgroups are.  Readership might be much higher if there weren't
all these cross-posted threads.  People glance through the newsgroup,
don't see anything but endless debating about unimportant matters, and
then they go elsewhere.  The result is that then you will find someone in
Montreal wanting to discuss singles groups in this city, but she does it
in can.general, and then you find locals in all kinds of specific
newsgroups, but they sure aren't around on the local scene.  In the past,
the cross-posting has seemed to come from elsewhere, from people just like
you who don't care about bothering other people and who think there
message is oh so importnat, but that isn't the case in recent weeks or
months.  It's people like you, in the local newsgroup, who start
cross-posting to all kinds of local newsgroups rather than deal in one
single newsgroup that hs more general coverage.  Something like
can.general.  But the funny thing is, most of the posts there are
cross-posts.  I went in there last night, closed my eyes and scrolled
through the message index, and then clicked about ten on at random. Most
if not all of them were cross-posts.

The cross-posting might be slightly less obnoxious if there were more
local and informative posts mixed in.  But it's rare that the endless
cross-posters to mtl.general, and that includes you, actually put anything
in the newsgroup of interest.

I didn't post the FAQ about working with the usenet community in
mtl.general the other day because I had a need to post and couldn't think
of anything original to say.  I was kind of hoping that you'd read it,
from your newsgroup behaviour I see no evidence that you have read it,
and maybe learn something.

All of this is besides the fact that often you don't have anything really
relevant to add to the threads.  It's also in addition to the fact that
you post with a massive signature;  I count 21 lines on the post I'm
replying to.  

Your BI goes up in direct proportion to how much you think your message
should disregard other people.

         Michael