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From: ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie )
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group,net.flame
Subject: Re: Fear and Loathing on the Clouds
Message-ID: <446@brl-sem.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 24-Oct-85 16:26:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-sem.446
Posted: Thu Oct 24 16:26:24 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Oct-85 04:11:04 EDT
References: <614@h-sc1.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
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Xref: watmath net.news:4144 net.news.group:3967 net.flame:12490

> 
> It seems that Gene Spafford has recently taken to reorganizing USENET
> to suit his tastes.  At first, he simply deleted a number of small,
> inoffensive newsgroups which had practically no traffic anyway.

But now he has gone out and created a whole shit load of mod.groups that
have no readership potential.  WHY?  He has carefully hidden this effort
in his stated effort of moving all the fa groups to be mod groups.  Well
I'm an ARPANET user and none of that mod.computers.* shit exists.  He
contradicts himself on his policies of list creation.  The traffic from
these idiotic group creation messages and the empty directories that they
have started alone is probably a significant load on the symbiosis of the
net.

> Recently, however, Spafford has taken it upon himself to delete two
> thriving, busy newsgroups --- net.internat and net.bizarre.  The case
> of net.internat is especially distressing, as this newsgroup's
> signal-to-noise ratio has reached heights heretofore undreamt of on |

Annoying yes, but not too distressing.  As I pointed out the last time
he tried to deep-six an thriving group, if you delete it it will just
automatically come back.  It is only the respect by the individual sites
for the net-experts like SPAF that causes these lists to really go away.

What is particulary annoying is that SPAF is not special in his powers,
any self-righteous person whose willing to offer to serve a lot of other
machines in their area (and become a de facto backbone site) can play
net censor.  I am currently fighting this out with our own management
here, who would like nothing more than to quench net.jokes, net.motss,
and other groups.  If we do not fulfill our committment to not censor
the news, we risk losing it all.  Hence we pass all the news along without
regard to content.

-Ron

Just what exactly is the "Clouds Project" anyway?