response 26 of 58:

Aug 7 08:04 UTC 1997

I think srw said a lot of sensible things in #23.  I too am sorry this
came out in public, but there's no sense dodging it now.

I really don't think that contributions of money to Grex are relevant to
this discussion at all.  As Steve said, the right to harass people is not
for sale on Grex.  And yes, I'd rather see us refund Sri's money than have
anyone think so.  Hopefully it won't come to that.

Sri, I'm sorry if there has been some teasing going on in party.  To some
extent, we all have to learn to deal with the consequences of our actions.
If you really did start a wave of telebombing, as you said you did, then
you can't really expect people to treat you without suspicion, can you? I
will say again: the best response to juvenile behavior is to keep your
cool and act like an adult. 

Luckily, this (coop, I mean) is a place where cooler heads have time to
prevail.  Sri, it's clear you're a clever person and you can be very
generous and helpful to other people.  (It was helpful to both Grex and
atticus when you helped atticus send us money from India.)  I'm sure the
staff eould rather have you on their side than fight with you.  That goes
for me, too. 

So #0 has spawned a few more questions in my mind:

1) Was the report of Sri telbombing lately a hoax?  Sri, do you specifically
   deny doing any of that lately, even in retaliation?

2) What can staff do to verify whether someone is telbombing or not?  Is there
   a way to make tel log all tels coming from a particular person?  Would it
   be ethical to do that?

3) Does staff have any means of censuring anyone, short of removing their
   account?  I realize in the case of a member we could revoke membership,
   but I don't think that's appropriate when membership privileges have
   nothing to do with the offense.

response 28 of 58:

Aug 7 12:29 UTC 1997

Any issues with nt should be settled through mail and not in a public
forum, like this item.
 
No user, no matter how much they have donated, should be allowed to
buy the right to harass other users.  If this is allowed, you will have
a nightmare on your hands in short order.

response 30 of 58:

Aug 7 14:47 UTC 1997

resp #29 is what I hope is an assessment of nt's party persona and hopefully
a partial explanation for why things occur the way they do.  I've expurgated
it due to the nature of the explanation concerning nt.  If it offends him,
I apologize, such is not my intention.  

response 32 of 58:

Aug 7 16:25 UTC 1997

I forgot how do read an exprgated item. Help me how to read that.

response 34 of 58:

Aug 7 22:03 UTC 1997

Re #31:  No.  Maybe you all are right, and the best thing to do is ignore the
whole thing.  My standard reaction when presented with a problem is to try to
understand it as well as poossible, but perhaps that's not appropriate here.

response 38 of 58:

Aug 9 10:19 UTC 1997

Jan's fix, which limits the amount of tels that can be sent in any amount of
time, helps a bit because telbombs are never very effective... to me, anyway.
They annoy others quite a bit.  

He was imitating your login?  Fascinating.  We've had that happen before. 
Quite a bit of this has happened at odd times before.

response 40 of 58:

Aug 10 15:58 UTC 1997

They are to be expected in a community containing everyone from spoiled brats
to testy codgers.

response 42 of 58:

Aug 11 16:13 UTC 1997

I'm just seeing this item for the first time.  I would point out that in the
original item no names were named.  We didn't intend to make this a personal
discussion of anyone.  I'm sorry that happened.

Techinical fixes for telbombs are difficult.  I have spent a lot of time
thinking about it.  It shouldn't interfere with normal usage of "tel".  It
shouldn't be a matter of me spending 15 hours making modifications that the
telbomb script writers can defeat in 5 minutes.

I haven't come up with any ideas much better than what is in place now.

Currently, tel won't let you send more than 4 tels in any 25 second period.  
If you try to send them faster, it will slow them down.  This limit doesn't
interfere with normal messaging, but it should slow things down enough so
that the recipient can type commands (like "mesg n") and see what he is
typing.

The real defense is turning your message permissions off, either for all users,
or, using the .nowrite mechanism, for just the user than it bombing you.
One problem with this is that even if you have turned permissions off, people
can send you tels for four minutes after the last time  you sent them a tel.
So if you want to stop someone from sending messages to you, you have to
stop sending messages to them.  I think this is very reasonable.

I have thought of having an explicit "mesg n" command turn off the four minute
reply window.  That way, if you already had your messages off, and sent a tel
to someone, they would have the four minute window to reply in, but if you
turned your messages off *after* sending them the message, the four minute
window would be canceled.  So if a person were being tel-bombed and he did
"mesg n" it would stop the flow of messages immediately, even if he had
recently sent a tel to the bomber.

If I did this, someone would immediately write a little script that (1) sends
a tel, and (2) instantly does a "mesg n".  This would send a telegram that
is not repliable to.  I'm not sure if this possibility is a bigger problem
then having to wait a few minutes before "mesg n" becomes effective.

If people have ideas on how to improve write's logic on these things, I'd
be pleased to hear about it.  Fair warning though -- write's logic on these
things is already pretty complex, and making changes is not simple.  It would
take a pretty good idea to spur me into action.

response 44 of 58:

Aug 13 13:27 UTC 1997

TS:  Retaliatory slander is a really, really bad idea.  I believe that nt
may have *asked* garima to make the response where she mentioned nt's name
(though I do not know this to be the case).  If that or something similar is
true, then you are now the only one slandering anyone in this item (I'm pretty
sure garima didn't ask you to post the nonsense above).  I know you have
the best intentions, but things aren't always what they appear and you should
take that possibility into account when formulating your responses.

response 46 of 58:

Aug 13 15:54 UTC 1997

   Thank you for saying that so well Jan.

response 48 of 58:

Aug 14 00:59 UTC 1997

I am frequently amazed at the willingness of some of our participants to
emgage in childlike behaviors, such as posting something written by someone
else under another login.  I really like to enjoy myself and have fun, but
I can't figure out the rationale behind behavior like this.  Or deliberately
antagonizing another Grexer whom one has never met by repeatedly sending them
unwanted mail or interrupting them when they are on Grex.  Perhaps, I tend
to forget the age or lack of maturity of some posters.  Or even worse (heavens
forbid) that some might be in an altered state when they post, and thus write
something they might be sorry for later on.