Shelly: Wayne was not the originator of the spam. He just had
some legitimate questions about the way it was handled and about
what the rules are and whether they were being enforced equally
or randomly. Wayne posed logical questions and was called names
(directly "lawyer" and indirectly "jerk and yahoo") and had his
integrity questioned for doing so.
Of course, not all of Wayne's suggestions are practical,
but I think they should have been accorded the same respect that
any of us would hope to be shown when we participate here.
Frankly, I think we would have probably been spared all
this exchange, if Jim had just contacted the sender and/or
blocked them from the list rather than sending his urgent SPAM
SPAM SPAM response which only drew more attention to it. But
that's all 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking!
By the way, I fully agree that people should accord the
courtesy of giving a legitimate address, but I also understand
that others will have divergent opinions on this for whatever
reasons. C'est la guerre!
Alan Walker
http://bonsai-bci.com http://LCBSBonsai.org
-----Original Message-----
From: I Shelly Hurd
Hi folks,
I would really like this discussion to END NOW.
Wayne - We DO have rules. that's a period
I don't feel the need to post them every two weeks. Right now, I
don't even know what you posted that got this reply, but the
"Group" knows our rules. I see below you think a -vote- on rules
is in order. IT ISN'T. Don't like the rules, okay, don't bother
us.
Regards
Shelly Hurd - List Owner.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wayne C. Morris"
In article ,
(Jim Lewis) wrote:
God. You must be a damned lawyer.
Hell, no. I just know the difference between for-sale/auction
and spam.
I subscribe to a bunch of newsgroups where on-topic FS/FA posts
are
welcome and spam is not. In a few groups where FS/FA posts
aren't allowed, it says so in the group's FAQ, which is usually
posted every 1-2 weeks.
you are one of those really, really nice guys who bollix up
their return address so one one can reply privately to you
-- which I would have much preferred to do.
I "bollix up my return address" precisely because I don't want
private replies. If someone wants to send me a message that
isn't appropriate subject matter for the newsgroup, I'm not
interested in reading it.
The IBC (list and news group) (and I as a member) pre-date
E-bay by 10 years or more. Ever since E-bay cranked up we
have had Non-regulars "drop by" to post news of the
wunnerful "stuff" they have for sale, and we have at _every_
instance responded with a notice that this is not
appropriate.
"Every instance"?
The last time anyone here objected to an FS/FA post was a year
ago. Since then, there have been 5 more bonsai-related for-sale
posts (not counting this latest one), none of which garnered any
complaints or objections -- not publicly, anyway. Anybody who
had been reading the newsgroup for those 11.5 months would have
concluded that bonsai-related FS/FA posts are rare but acceptable
here.
(I didn't count the real spam. Spam isn't welcome anywhere, but
spammers don't give a damn about rules, and they never stick
around long enough to read *any* messages, much less the
complaints about their own posts.)
There have been a few lengthy threads here discussing the spam
problem, during brief peaks in the amount of spam. But at no
point in those threads did anyone ever say bonsai-related FS/FA
posts are inappropriate.
We have iterated and re-iterated here that we will NOT open
the floodgates to every jerk and yahoo who happens to have a
plant, a pot, (or a book) for sale on any one of the auction
sites.
Then people have gotten pretty lax about re-iterating it in the
past year, since nobody ever complained about the 5
bonsai-related FS/FA posts during that time. As for "opening the
floodgates", I think you're greatly overestimating the potential
bonsai-related FS/FA traffic. I'm a longtime regular In another
group with 4 times the traffic of this one, and which encourages
on-topic FS/FA posts, but that group gets an average of less than
2 such posts per day -- hardly what I'd call a flood!
If you insist that the welcome message be changed
Only if you insist on enforcing a "no bonsai-related
for-sale/auction posts" rule. If you want people to obey a set
of rules, it's up to you to ensure that newcomers can read those
rules. Waiting until they've broken
a rule before telling them about it is a waste of everyone's
time.
Futhermore, if you ever want to complain to an ISP about one of
their
users breaking the rules, you'll need to be able to show that the
group *does* have rules, and not just "guidelines". I've seen
one case where a newsgroup's rules were posted only in something
titled "Unofficial FAQ",
so an ISP concluded that their user hadn't broken any *official*
rules.
If you do write up a set of rules for the newsgroup & mailing
list, I
think it ought to be presented for discussion & voting, just in
case the current subscribers don't agree with whatever the
consensus was years ago. (The owners of the mailing list can
impose any rules they like on the list, but an unmoderated
newsgroup cannot be controlled by any one person, not even the
person who created it.)
It'd also be nice to incorporate the rules into a properly
formatted FAQ, and cross-posted to rec.answers and news.answers
so that it'd be available on all the FAQ archive web sites like
www.faq.org. Details on how to do it, including ways to have it
auto-posted regularly, can be found at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/news-answers/guidelines/.
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