u/Parker51MKII

r/ClassicUsenet is seeking an additional qualified moderator at this time.

We were created in 2022, currently have about 1400 subscribers, 60 approved users, 18 months of continuous daily posting activity, and are set to Restricted, so our queue is small. Familiarity with text-based discussion Usenet (versus binary downloads) is desired.

(For more information, see our Wiki as well as our pinned posts under Community Highlights.)

Some of these true accounts from the "front lines" of Usenet newsgroup moderation are pretty ridiculous, even in the "truth is stranger than fiction" sense.

And now, the tales can be told!

Also claims that they are leaving the newsgroup, only to post to it again a short time later.

>TL;DR: I created a new website (easily used on mobile or desktop) with episode guides for TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT, with Tim Lynch's spoiler reviews, short & full synopses, quick rating overviews by Jammer and Algernon_Asimov (where available), and full-text search. Each can be installed as a stand-alone "app" on mobile.

https://gabindu.gitlab.io/trek-guides

I've always been a fan of the original spoiler-reviews posted by Tim Lynch on Usenet, and although they can be found online, they were quite hard to navigate and/or read (especially on mobile) - so I decided to create a new site (with permission by Tim himself). Without changing the actual content, all his posts were reflowed and reformatted, and his end-of-seasons re-reviews were integrated on each page (as popup "knowls") for easy comparison.

As a bonus, I included various things a geek like myself appreciates:

• Screenshots and misc. episode metadata pulled from various sources
• short (spoiler-free) and full synopses
• Jammer's ratings (with links to his full reviews)
• Algernon_Asimov's "Essential?" ratings ("Engage!", "meh", "Just for fun", "Avoid" - shown as icons), where they exist (TNG & DS9)
• full-text search
• keyboard shortcuts for quick navigation (on desktop)

The site is completely ad-free and without monetization. Enjoy!

"I confirm that we received two exact body duplicates of this week's XXX bulletins at XXX in rapid succession tonight (less than two minutes apart). They were identical, save for the header differences shown below:

XXX

The first one was XXX approved and appears in the newsgroup:

XXX

the second one was rejected as a body duplicate (we do this to protect our newsgroup from duplicates in XXX approved content). We do not consider an article with the same Subject but different body contents to be a duplicate. We are not sure why this happened, but find that it happens rarely, and is likely a technical glitch in how e-mail is sent, especially from mailing lists. This also occurred occasionally for submitters from Google Groups, for example. The two different Message-ID's also appear to confirm that the duplication occurred on the sending side, and was not a duplication on the receiving side (i.e., at XXX).

This appears to be working as designed. Sorry for any confusion or alarm, though. I hope that we can continue to have the opportunity to relay all non-duplicate XXX bulletins immediately, and XXX, to our newsgroup in the future."

"The articles were erroneously re-sent from another site (XXX) out of our control, probably due to a technical error. We hold the individuals named in the From: lines of the articles harmless in this unforeseen event. We would hope that you would extend us the same courtesy.

As you were not a regular participant on our newsgroup, the article with your name on it fell into our manual review queue, where we were able to quickly reject it without prejudice. Otherwise, it would have been posted to our newsgroup.

We have since locked down our site until this incident is resolved, and feel that we sufficiently have 'our act together' on this matter."

I love this community but contributing to reddit seems immoral to me given the way they support AI development and awful site-wide moderation. Is there a community for programmers to ask and receive answers? Kinda like StackOverflow but it's dead so im looking for alternatives.

This post was inspired by reading Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (which, by the way, is great). I was confused when I first read it without knowing when it was written, because the society she writes (in the book’s ‘present’, >!not the time travel bit of course!<) feels modern, but a large part of the plot hinges on (very minor spoilers ahead) people not being able to reach each other because the phone lines are blocked or because they’re not at the phone when the other person calls, or the connection cuts etc - even though the phones do have a video screen and you can see the other person. Took me a while to realise it was written well before mobile phones, and while Willis correctly predicted the video calling component, she couldn’t imagine phones being mobile. Reading it now, it’s a bit bemusing.

Any other examples of fun cases like this where the author was kinda right but also kinda wrong? Or just where a tech innovation seems anachronistic now?

* I use the terms prediction and anachronism loosely here - obviously stories are fiction and not trying to predict the future accurately, but this one was amusing to me.

I saw DS9 before I saw TNG, so it was somewhat jarring to see the (perceived) regression of the ferengi in TNG.

(News flash to the complainer: Unauthenticated cancels just for content and not objective metrics like Breidbart Index, let alone unauthenticated cancel messages sent from sites other than that which originated the article, haven't been a thing in over three decades, mostly due to scenarios like these.)

" > This is spam.

That is obviously false. It may be that the messages you are complaining about are against policy for the XXX group - I have not investigated that and so have no opinion on that as of yet. But to call is spam is laughable:

1. It's not commercial (or financial in any way)
2. It's not indiscriminately posted

Further, it seems at least marginally relevant to the XXX, though I admit I probably would not have posted it in a XXX group myself.

And finally... This post didn't come from XXX. It was approved by moderators of the XXX group, who work from XXX, but it did not originate here. Your beef is with the original poster of the message, not with the XXX (who just passed it on) or XXX (likewise).

> Pretty much all posts from XXX to XXX is spam.

> XXX is a Spam source.

You know, when I was younger, you would have had me screaming in outrage over this insult. We were the first ISP to ever remove a user for spamming by mail (1991). We were the first ISP to remove a user for spamming newsgroups (1992? I forget- the second "green card lawyer" spam run). We were the first to issue cancels for spam from our users (same incident). We were the ISP behind the first content-neutral canceller (XXX). We wrote the first posting rate limiter for INN to prevent spam from being issued (1997, XXX). Etc etc etc.

These days I don't have the energy to do much more than roll my eyes.

> If this spam does not cease, I will set up a cancelbot, cancelling ALL posts from XXX servers.

> I will encourage peers to black hole XXX, and I will ensure that any network under my control drop XXX traffic.

> You have until Friday this week (26 September) to stop your spam.

Seriously? You went right for the usenet death penalty? Without ever having complained to us before? A brief glance at the headers shows that the article was posted from Google. Do you propose to cancel all google-sourced posts as well? (Good luck with that.)

Did you even contact the admins of XXX first to complain about the articles you find questionable? I note that the complaint address, XXX, which I have CCed this to, is included in the headers of every message approved by the XXX moderators.

If you can't settle your disagreement with XXX, I think you need to take it up with news.admin.something - maybe .net-abuse.misc, or .moderation. After all, in the unlikely event that you were to be able to significantly affect XXX's news propagation, the XXX moderators would simply go somewhere else, and the net result of your actions would be a ton of your time wasted, and a lot of innocent bystanders (XXX users) getting hurt. What's the point?

> --

> XXX - Always a NetHead

> Wasting Bandwidth since 1981

You know, if you've been around that long, you should already know that we're about as good net citizens as you can find on this planet. Why would you want to pick a fight with us???"

It should not be used as an excuse to prevent the reporting of insulting, abusive, or threatening content, nor to suppress the revelation of rebuttal evidence in the face of a false accusation or denial.

Short of a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement or overarching laws like those for medical privacy or attorney-client privilege, revealing the contents of e-mail is not illegal.