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Re: Please stop feeding the troll

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On Wednesday, May 15, 2013 10:47:42 AM UTC-7, Steve wrote:
> About the forum/list.  I was going to start something up about my
> products and offered to cohost Misc discussions as there seems no
> other place.  But extending things out to more products might dilute
> the main topics a bit.  But it sounds interesting.  Thinking about it,
> there is no real way to control troll behaviour on Usenet
> unmoderated.  Maybe there is room for a sponsored moderated site for
> all forth subjects.  It is sad, but Usenet is being caned by tolling,
> and we may have lost 90% of real members because of it.  Starting a
> site is not going to get them back in a rush, but over time it could
> be built up.

Actually, moderated sites have their own problems. 

Consider comp.lang.asm.x86 (CLAX), which is about x86 assembly-language. When Randy Hyde wrote HLA (High-Level-Assembler), he was attacked relentlessly on the basis that it wasn't really an assembler, but was actually a high-level language (HLL). Mostly it was the RosAsm guy, but everybody else got in on the act as well. It was all foolishness though --- HLA allows the programmer to dedicate registers globally --- what other definition is there of an assembler? The whole situation got out of hand, with everybody spending all of their time flaming him. Eventually Hyde got banned from CLAX, not because he had done anything wrong himself, but just because his continued presence was bringing out the worst in everybody. This was all before my time at CLAX, although I stumbled into the aftermath of the debacle by showing up and mentioning that I was using HLA, not realizing that there was some history on CLAX with HLA. 

It will be difficult for you, as the moderator of this brave new forum, to avoid similar problems. How will you define exactly what is on-topic and what is off-topic? If CLAX can't define what x86 assembly-language is, which I would have expected to be a trivial one-sentence definition, then how will you define what is on-topic in your forum?

See this thread for a discussion of the current state of affairs at CLAX:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.lang.asm.x86/54Z3YeZA4Xk
Nathan Baker is starting a new forum for HLA, and possibly related subjects.

For the most part, moderated groups are far better than unmoderated groups, but you still get flame-wars, so it is not a perfect solution. 

The only way I can think of to avoid flame-wars, is to ban humans from the internet altogether, and only allow beagles --- they are much nicer animals, really.

P.S. Steve, you have really got to do something about that spell-checker of yours --- your posts remind me of those Ad-Libs games that kids fill out, plugging arbitrary nouns, verbs and adjectives into sentences. We are all getting "caned by tolling" now!

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Please stop feeding the troll fred <email@address.com> - 2013-05-13 12:32 +0100
  Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-13 08:59 -0400
    Re: Please stop feeding the troll Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-05-13 09:01 -0500
      Re: Please stop feeding the troll fred <email@address.com> - 2013-05-13 15:22 +0100
        Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-13 14:21 -0400
          Re: Please stop feeding the troll Roberto Waltman <usenet@rwaltman.com> - 2013-05-13 17:48 -0400
            Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-13 23:07 -0400
              Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-13 22:53 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 05:17 -0400
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 09:10 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll daveyrotten <danw8804@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 10:10 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 10:47 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-14 18:45 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 19:33 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 20:42 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-05-14 20:50 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 21:13 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 01:36 -0400
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-14 23:11 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 00:32 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-15 02:31 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 23:27 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-14 23:07 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 00:17 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 00:28 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-15 02:24 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 10:47 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-05-15 16:52 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 18:51 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-05-17 14:30 +0000
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-19 05:17 -0700
                Re: Please stop feeding the troll awegel@arcor.de (Alex Wegel) - 2013-05-16 01:50 +0200
            Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-14 08:33 -0700
  Re: Please stop feeding the troll rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 02:58 -0400
    Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 00:20 -0700
    Re: Please stop feeding the troll jacko <jackokring@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 08:39 -0700
      Re: Please stop feeding the troll Steve <nospam275@gmail.com> - 2013-05-15 10:47 -0700

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