On Mon, 10 Jun 1996, Bill Frantz wrote:
One question to ponder is whether the a.r.s war will perform the same role as the Spanish Civil War vs. WW2. Will we see newsgroup war expand to other news groups? I would think a few of the .culture.* groups could be candidates.
Already happened. That's why soc.genealogy.african went moderated a few months ago. The people in soc.culture.jewish deal with it by posting a killfile FAQ regularly. Looks like soc.culture.latin-american, which I followed for academic reasons three years ago, just gave up, splitting into country-specific groups that are moderated. Pity. alt.slack beat them off because, well, they're so much smarter and funnier than any troller. :-) Some (supposedly) closed mailing lists are openly talking about a vertical spam of alt.revisionism. Someone new to alt.revisionism might think it has already happened, but in fact the group is eminently readable and productive for both sides if you killfile just two people, and followups to their articles (three if you count the current incarnation of Serdar Argic, who should be in everyone's global killfile). The general mood in news.groups is tilting towards at least robo-moderation (posts handled by an automatic script that can have a twit filter). I think it's a shame. -rich