Sick of trolls! 3725

I dunno - notice the yo-yo on the other four months which doesn't show in c.o.l.m.

I've had that for years, in addition to killing on more than 4 crossposts, and any crosspost to a 'microsoft', 'win', or 'public' group. What I'm looking at now is killing on crossposts to any non-computer related group.

Some may be irritated, some may be confused. I think I'm seeing an increase in the number of posts to "other" alternative groups. In the FAQ, you mention a comprehensive overview of 159 Linux newsgroups.

compton ~$ grep -c linux .newsrc 1108 compton ~$

Many of them likely have next to no traffic. I'm scanning 32, and will often recommend to readers in those groups like 'alt.comp.os.linux' to try the main groups - they still have a substantially higher readership, which means a better chance of getting questions answered. On the other hand, there are groups like alt.os.linux.(mandrakeredhatslackwaresuse)' that get decent traffic, because there are regulars there who answer questions specific to those distributions.

I don't read the on-line forums - the few that I've looked at have either been rather boring, or otherwise failed to spark my interest.

Moderated forums are more useful, but tend to be slow. They should be able to control trollish behavior.

I've not been in favor of that much moderation. Often, the moderation has degraded to using Igor Chudov's "Robomod", rather than having a real person (or as Dances With Crows points out "many" people) actually looking at the posts. "news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting" is moderated, and a fairly low traffic group, yet there are about a dozen real moderators in addition to the Robomod.

I don't think it would be the first time.

Old guy