[Followups set to alt.pog.mo.thoin]
Alan Brand wrote:
> D. Spencer Hines wrote considerably more than:
>
>> 'Nuff Said.
>
> At last.
>
> Perhaps you'll drop the cross-posting to alt.fan.british-accent now?
I think that by now we've established to everyone's satisfaction that
nobody here wants postings by Dispenser. Of course it's true that an
idiotic posting sometimes triggers an interesting thread - we in
alt.usage.english once spent an interesting time trying to work out
whether top-posting was acceptable if you could design a teletypewriter
to feed the paper backwards - but as a rule those "interesting" threads
will turn out to be interesting only to your own home group.
I'd like therefore to suggest some rules of etiquette to be applied when
a thread - usually started by a troll like D. Hencer Spines - is spread
over multiple unrelated newsgroups:
1. If you have something to say to all the victims, as I'm doing now,
set the followups in such a way as to exclude all newsgroups except
possibly your own home group. (I'm assuming that nobody will want to
follow up to this posting of mine. If I'm wrong, then application of
the
following rules should limit the damage.)
2. Identify your own newsgroup. (I'm posting from alt.usage.english.)
That way, anyone who wants to respond will have to involve at most two
newsgroups, which is a more manageable and acceptable situation.
3. If all else fails, delete at least one of the newsgroups each time
you respond, so that each spawned subthread will tend gradually to
affect fewer and fewer newsgroups. (If you're not sure what to do,
just
delete one randomly chosen group.)
4. Be on the lookout for the cases where the troll restores the deleted
groups. Usually that can be best handled by never responding to the
troll himself.
'Nuff said. If I respond any further in this thread, it will be to fewer
groups.
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists.
My e-mail addresses at newcastle.edu.au will probably remain "live"
for a while, but then they will disappear without warning.
The optusnet address still has about 5 months of life left.
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