bb wrote in
:

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:09:08 GMT, John Fereira
wrote:

Sure, it's simple to delete posts that you're not going to read buy why
should we?

You don't need to bother deleting them, just have the willpower not
to read them.

When did I claim that I've been reading them? For about a week on a typical
day I would open up my newsreader, select r.b.p. (one of about a dozen
groups that I subscribe to) and will see that 50-100 new messages have been
posted. From the subject lines I can see a handful of what appear to be
paddling related articles so I pick them out and read them. I also see a
bunch of threads that are clearly off topic, some with subject lines that
are essentially calling one of the participants names. As is the case with
most newsreaders, if I don't want to see the same articles the next time I
read the group I have to mark the articles as read (even if I don't read
them). So even though I'm not actually reading every article posted to the
group I have to take action to indicate that I don't want to see them.
Furthermore, when 80-90% of the articles posted are off topic, it become
more difficult to find articles that *are* paddling related.

This is a newsgroup about paddling. There are many other
newsgroups in which political discussion, and even flaming is on topic.
Those that want to read that kind of article can go to those groups.

That all sounds just dandy, but it doesn't work in reality. I tried
going from the boating news group to the political group to talk
politics, and a boating topic broke out. I left my football group and
went the flame group to do some flaming and a football discussion
broke out. Even the dang political and flaming groups stray off
topic. Personally, I think it's all Bush's fault.

I don't expect that every newsgroup is going to remain 100% on topic, but
when 80-90% of the group consist of off topic posts, to the point where some
of the participants in those threads are essentially just calling each other
names and creating new thread solely for that purpose it's getting a bit out
of hand.


That's
the whole point of creating topically based groups.

Stop blaming others for your own lack of willpower. It fairly easy to
skip posts that aren't relevant.

Again, I'm not reading the off topic posts. I still have to read the
subject line for the thread to know if they're off topic and then mark them
as read. It's much easier to skip posts that are not relevant if they're
posted in a group that I haven't subscribed to.

I've been reading this
group for about 7 years and this is the worse case of off-topic article
posting I've ever seen. I've been participating on usenet for 20 years
and the number of off-topic article to on topic articles is just about
the highest ratio I've seen as well.

Get used to it because it's not going to go away. Society changes,
even use net society.

Those that continue to post the off topic articles are just flat out
rude.

Off topic is now the norm. You may consider it rude, but it is now
the norm.

At least in this newsgroup, off topic is not the norm, which is one of the
reasons that I have continued to read it for 7 years.