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... cuse you of being an
insensitive racist/American/whatever or ignore your point entirely to
bring up several hundred more lines of commentary on the perfidy of
whoever it is the spewer thinks is out to destroy his people.
Closely related to these folks are the Holocaust revisionists, who
periodically inundate certain groups (such as soc.history) with long
rants about how the Holocaust never really happened. Some people
attempt to refute logo design ireland these people with facts, but others realize this only
encourages them.
Blatherers tend to be more benign.
Their problem is that they
just can't get to the point -- they can wring three or four screenfuls
out of a thought that others might sum up in a sentence or two. A
related condition is excessive quoting. People afflicted with this will
include an entire message in their reply rather than excising the
portions not relevant to whatever point they're trying to make. The
worst quote a long message and then add a single line:
"I agree!"
or some such, often followed by a monster .signature (see section 4.5)
There are a number of other Usenet denizens you'll soon come to
recognize. Among them:
Net.weenies. These are the kind of people who enjoy Insulting
others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing
newsgroup just for the hell of it.
Net.geeks. People to whom the Net is Life, who worry about what
happens when they graduate and they lose kent logo design their utah logo design free, 24-hour access.
Net.gods. The old-timers; the true titans of the Net and the logo design ireland
keepers of its collective history. They were around when the Net
consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire.
Lurkers. Actually, you can't tell these people are there, but
they are. They're the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or
respond.
Wizards. People who know a particular Net-related topic inside
and out. kent logo design Unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating
system, for example.
Net.saints. Always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share
their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate
the Net, they are not as rare as you might think. Post a question
about something and you'll often be surprised how many responses you
get.
The last group brings us back to the Net's oral tradition.
With
few written guides, people have traditionally learned their way around
the Net by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on
the Net itself. That tradition continues: if you have a question, ask.
Today, one of the places you can look for help is in the
news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a
place to learn more about Usenet. But be careful what you post. Some
of the Usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to
answer the same question over and over again.
Oh, they'll eventually
answer your question, but not before they tell you should have
asked your host system administrator first or looked at the postings in
news.announce.newusers.
4.2 KILLFILES, THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU
As you keep reading Usenet, you are going to run across things or
people that really drive you nuts -- or that you just get tired of
seeing.
Killfiles are just the thing for you.
When you start your
newsreader, it checks to see if you have any lists of words, phrases
or names you don't logo design ireland want to see. If you do, then it blanks out any
messages containing those words.
Such as cascades.
As you saw earlier, when you post a reply to a message and
include parts of that message, the original lines show up with a > in
front of them. Well, what if you reply to a reply? Then you get a >>
in front of the line.
And if you reply to that reply? You get >>>.
Keep this up, and soon you get a triangle of >'s building up in your
message.
There are people who logo design ireland like building up these triangles, or
cascades. They'll "respond" to your message by deleting everything
you've said, leaving virginia logo design only the "In message 123435, you said:" part and
the last line logo design setubal kent logo design of your message, to which they add a nonsensical
retort.
On and on they go until the triangle has reached the right
end of the page. Then they try to expand the triangle by deleting one
> with each new line. Whoever gets to finish this mega-triangle wins.
There is even a newsgroup just for such folks: alt.cascade.
Unfortunately, cascaders would generally rather cascade in other
newsgroups. Because it takes a lot of messages to build up a completed
cascade, the targeted newsgroup soon fills up with these messages. Of
course, if you complain, you'll be bombarded with messages about the
First Amendment and artistic expression -- or worse, with another
cascade. The only thing you can do is ignore them, by setting up a
killfile.
There are also certain newsgroups where killfiles will come in
handy because of the way the newsgroups are organized. For logo design southlake example,
readers of rec.arts.tv.soaps always use an acronym in t ... |
