Fred K. Lenherr (lenherr at tiac.com) wrote:
: The question is, how do we keep ads/pyramid schemes/junk email out of
: the unmoderated newsgroups?
You can't. However the people who run the news group can send email to the
people on the side. In bionet.info-theory the rule (stated in the faq) is
that nobody responds to the postings on the group. If you want to object,
you do it by email and so save everybody multiple bother. This has been
pretty effective for bionet.info-theory. Generally I send a message to the
"perp" and to postmaster@ the same address, asking the postmaster to
permanently revoke internet access by the "perp". I also ask the postmaster
to teach their people not to do this again. I point out that it has wasted
lots of medical scientist's time. On rare occasion they will apologize.
Usually they don't have the guts and we never hear from them again. For a
the second offense (which has not occured yet) harsher measures can be
taken.
This is the relevant section in the bionet.info-theory faq
(ftp://ftp.ncifcrf.gov/pub/delila/bionet.info-theory.faq):
***********************************************************
|-| What Can I Do About Inappropriate Postings?
The short form of this news group's name, bio-info, can be a little confusing
to some people inexperienced in network communications or with little
knowledge of the discipline (if there is any :-) of biological information
theory. It can and has been mistaken as a news group for general biological
information. Our readers should be aware that when such postings come to our
attention, we do attempt to inform, privately, the people who make these
inappropriate postings of the error of their ways and suggest alternative or
more appropriate venues.
Subjecting the writers of inappropriate posting to public excoriation is not a
good policy because the mistake is usually inadvertent and the follow-up
postings add further to the irritation of our regular readers. When others
publicly reply to such posts in this news group, although they may think they
are being polite to the original poster, they are still annoying our regular
readers. We suggest that a better policy for readers who do wish to reply to
inappropriate posts is to do so privately or to an appropriate news group.
For information about how to deal with intransigent cases, see:
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/blacklist.html
***********************************************************
Tom Schneider
National Cancer Institute
Laboratory of Mathematical Biology
Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201
toms at ncifcrf.govhttp://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/
