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From: CS@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.misc
Subject: A Note From Portal Regarding the "JJ" Incident
Message-ID: <6135@cup.portal.com>
Date: 1 Jun 88 17:26:19 GMT
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 63
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.1162

Here is a summary of the JJ incident and the steps we at Portal have
taken as a result of it.

The JJ incident was a case where a user on Portal went out of control,
posting solicitations to many newsgroups on the Usenet conferencing
network.  This generated a lot of extra network traffic and cost.  The
nature of the posting (a request for money) also upset much of the
Usenet community.

After this took place, we at Portal immediately disabled the user's
account, making it no longer possible for the user, a Mr. Rob Noha, to
use Portal.

We then sent out cancel posting to minimize the transmission of the JJ
postings.

Since the messages he had posted involved a solicitation of funds to be
sent through the mail, we immediately contacted the postal inspector
for Lincoln, Nebraska.  We relayed the content of his messages to the
inspector and were unfortuantely informed that there was nothing they
could do.  If you or anyone you know has information that may be useful
in our pursuing Mr. Noha, we would appreciate your contacting us at
408/973-9111 or sending a note to CS@cup.portal.com.  Likewise, if
anyone requires our participation in taking any action regarding this
situation, please advise us how we can help.

We made a policy decision no longer allow Mr. Noha to use Portal.

We believe Mr. Noha is an unusual case.  He apparently knew what he was
doing when he posted his last message because we later learned he had a
history of posting similar messages to the net over a several month
period.  Those messages were apparently not sufficiently provocative or
widespread enough to be brought to our attention.  He had apparently
gotten negative feedback from others on the net but chose to ignore
it.  We believe Mr. Noha is not a rational man.

For regular users of Portal we do several things to assure users who
particiapte on the net understand how the net works and what are its
customs.

Our "System Guidebook" is mailed first class to all users and contains
descriptive information about Usenet.

The Portal Information reference section on the system contains many
informative articles from the newsgroup news.announce.newusers.

The "help" subsystem of Portal contains both technical and cultural
information regarding Usenet.

Finally, the Portal gateway to Usenet requires a user who wants to post
an article to specify the group and distribution.  Because new users do
not know how to specify this information, they nd up having to read the
introductory material on Usenet before posting articles.

As always, we're open to suggestion on how we can improve this aspect
of Portal.

One thing we're interested in is making available the guidelines for
use of other networks such as Bitnet, ARPAnet and others.  Our general
approach is to provide as much education as possible regarding
networks, their use, and customs.

Customer Service at Portal Communications