response 88 of 157:

Sep 10 05:08 UTC 2000

There would be one really nice side-effect of getting a restraining
order against willard, twinkie, and the rest.  Nice for M-Net, anyway.
They'd have to *stay* on M-Net, and they'd have to take an interest in
its survival if they wanted to have a place to play.  They might actually
have to think about how they affect it.  Sure can't hurt it... or them.

The stuff that willard, iggy and slynne are dumping in Agora is mostly
noise, worthless.  There have been times when there was so much of it
that it amounted to a denial-of-service attack (and still does, from the
response of some people).  A restraining order would benefit us too.

Willard, get lost.  (Will he?  I doubt it.  But it'll be fun to see if
he's a man of his word, or just another liar.)

response 90 of 157:

Sep 10 06:12 UTC 2000

Nobody is required to like or agree to all of the posts.  *COPE*

response 92 of 157:

Sep 10 13:15 UTC 2000

Denial of service my ass.  Agora is not any less usable than it has
ever been.  In fact, I would argue that it is 'enhanced' by the
contributions of its newcomers, myself included.  There is a much
wider array of discussion available.

response 94 of 157:

Sep 10 14:07 UTC 2000

I don't know if you have to show intent in these things.  But is so, 
there's this, among other things:

   #129 of 227 by James Howard (jp2) on Tue Jun 6 23:06:26 2000: 

   I say we should turn Agora into a rotting pit of slime like 
   General.  Or has it already started?  I'm not reading it.

   #130 of 227 by Mike (willard) on Tue Jun 6 23:39:58 2000: 

   I'm working on it.  Come help.

response 96 of 157:

Sep 10 14:11 UTC 2000

Definitely.  Especially since everyone knows we were joking, and that
we'd never do anything to hurt our friendly granola-eating neighbors.

response 98 of 157:

Sep 10 15:30 UTC 2000

You have thoughts?  Wow.

response 100 of 157:

Sep 10 17:18 UTC 2000

How does the twit filter work?  I did not know it existed.  I get the general
impression that m-net is oriented more towards people practicing their social
skills, and grex more towards exchanging facts and opinions about these facts.
When three quarters of the new items in grex are posted by people with the
m-net type approach, it is sort of hard to find the items of the other sort.
I know at least one other grexer who has simply stopped reading agora, and
I have pretty much stopped posting new items, since what starts off as a
serious discussion soon gets covered with what I consider grafitti.  So it
is not simply a matter of not reading postings by certain people.  If the few
people from m-net who discovered grex when m-net was down, and have continued
to post on grex in agora, are NOT trying to annoy grexers, would they mind
explaining their purpose of posting m-net style items and responses on grex?
There may simply be some sort of misunderstanding, rather than a deliberate
attempt to annoy.  It could be that they are doing their best to entertain
grexers, and feeing unappreciated, when the same postings on m-net would have
been viewed differently.  Culture clash.    If these are deliberate attempts
to annoy, I suggest ignoring them until the posters get bored and go away.

response 102 of 157:

Sep 10 19:27 UTC 2000

resp:87 Ken, fair enough. But we are talking about one or two people 
here. Should we generalize their sentiments to include all Mnetters? 
Shall we then conclude that all grexers are complete assholes based on 
resp:88 ? 

Dont worry, I know that most grexers are nothing like russ, thank 
goodness. I wonder if we could get a restraining order to keep russ from 
posting on grex? I know that I think of his posts as worthless noise. I 
think he probably keeps a lot of really nice people from posting on grex 
because he is so negative. (for the sarcasm impared: I am not *really* 
suggesting that we ban russ) 

response 108 of 157:

Sep 11 00:30 UTC 2000

Russ - yes, I remember why I'm not gypsi.  I wanted to be birdy since that's
my nickname.  Simple as that.  It's a LOGIN not a PERSON.  I'm still me.

response 110 of 157:

Sep 11 01:13 UTC 2000

Re #100:  My goodness, Sindi.  Have you forgotten all the twit filter
items I posted?  At least twice, I gave complete instructions for rolling
your own twit filter that removes responses from people you consider to
be not worth your attention.  Here it is again.

To make a twit filter, create a file (called "twit" in this example, though
you could call it anything you want).  If you want to get rid of responses
by willard, twinkie and slynne, put the following lines in the file "twit":

/^#.*(slynne)/,/^$/d
/^#.*(twinkie)/,/^$/d
/^#.*(willard)/,/^$/d           (you get the idea)

Then alter your pager setting.  If your pager setting is currently
"more", then change it to "sed -f twit | more".  This activates the
twit filter.  To deactivate it, change your pager back to just "more".
To make it start up that way, put the following line in your .cfonce file:

def pager "sed -f twit | more"

The next step is to have a simple twitlist without all the sed command
stuff and expand it automatically, and beyond that to have an option to
auto-forget new items by people in the twitlist.  This is enough to
"scratch my itch", though.  For now.

response 112 of 157:

Sep 11 02:24 UTC 2000

I'm rather curious about the apparent obsession some Grexers have with me.

If memory serves, I entered maybe 10 items in Agora. Given the proposed 2/day
rule, that would put me at one business week...in a conference that spans
months.

More importantly, the bulk of my posts have been serious responses, albeit,
in a format which is apparently foreign to many of Agora's participants. In
a Grexian scale...these three paragraphs should have take up several kilobytes
of text. Let's just pretend that some of us are able to make a point, without
pontificating ad nauseum.

Moving on...

A restraining order is a rather intriguing notion, although, I don't believe
the State of Michigan could really issue one in this case. After all, a
restraining order prevents a person from coming within a certain distance from
another person, and bans communication via postal mail and telephone. (I know
this, because I was going to get a restraining order against someone.) None
of thses things would prevent someone from accessing Grex -- so long as they
can get on the net without a POTS line.

As far as a lawsuit goes...exactly who would be suing? Cyberspace
Communications? Wouldn't you need to take a vote on that? And more
importantly...could you get a vote on that?

Let's assume that you could.

What would be the basis of the lawsuit? Violating nonexistent rules? Not being
nice? Entering "too many" items or responses, when there's no set baseline?

And let's not forget exactly who you're suing. Off the top of my head, I can
say that I'm 95% certain that jp2 and willard are both in high-level network
engineer-type positions. (I happen to be, as well) Do you honestly think that
we (collectively) couldn't "out-lawyer" Grex? Just thinking about it is
laughable. Oh sure, you could set up a "Grex Legal Fund", but my gues is that
most Grexers would rather see that money go towards more useful things.

But I digress. As interesting as this may be...I think I should point out that
this post would have been at least 50kb in 4 different posts, if I were a
"Real Grexer" ;-)