valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Val valerie Jan 8 04:49:22 2004 Valerie Mates valerie Jan 8 04:4958 responses total.
I've sent mail to this person. I haven't the slightest idea if it will work, but we'll see.
It's extreme, but revoking membership and refusing to grant another membership will certainly send a message. Dunno if it'll be the right message, but it's something to think about.
What exactly are tel-bombs? Maybe, if you just talk to him nicely, it just might work. Have a chat with the fellow.
Nt is a kewl guy. He tells me he won't do it again.
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I'd way one warning and then if ignored, start with a month's suspension of membership privileges. Longer suspensions later if it continues. That's if you want to go slow. I don't really think a year or more or permanent suspension are unreasonable in view of the maliciousness involved. It's certainly no mistake or misunderstanding.
nt has already told me that he will not be renewing his membership. I'm not sure what we can to, precisely. He's on grex, to my knowledge, because it's an open access unix system. I dont' recall him ever taking advantage of user benifits. All I know is that he respects staff, or he did. They would seem to be the ones that could best deal with it. Simple membership suspensions won't do the trick.
some sorts of 'abuse' get loginids splatted, maybe not this one?
To put this in perspective: nt is not only a member of Grex, he was also the largest buyer of items in the auction ($91 worth), and he has pledged and sent in $100 to support the ISDN line. He's also acted as go-between to help us get money from people in India. There is no question that he has been very generous to Grex lately, and we are very thankful. Having said all that, I think it is quite irrelevant. The Grex staff cannot be put in the position of "looking the other way" when someone has been a large contributor. That's almost a definition of corruption. Any censure that is meted out should be the same regardless of someone's membership status, which means I don't think removing membership privileges is a good reaction.
telbombers should have their accounts splatted.
Hey nt is a cool guy. I know he has been a generous contributor to grex but that is beside the point. It would be too harsh punishment to simply delete his login or cancel his membership. Maybe all he needs is a warning and see what happens then.
Senna, I told I wont renew my membership if one particular guy becomes member of GREX..remember? yeah "nt" is a kewl guy..go figure :) I know I owe a public apology. I started this crappy telbombing maybe 6 months back. Steve Andrea deleted ctel*. But I use that program only when the other guy starts first. Yesterday in party a guy was saying people that somebody is telbombing. People think its me cuz I started this crap. But the fact is Steve deleted my programs and I decided not to use such programs anymore, so how in the hell could I telbomb anybody. what happens if people who dont like me complain to staff that I'm still telbombing.(Now people can advantage of this issue and just mail staff that I'm telbombing). The only difference between me & them is I dont complain, they do.
In these days of .yeswrite and .nowrite, the only problem with tel-bombs is that we are not doing a good enough job of telling users how to use them.
I choose not to comment on the sixth line of nt's response.
I would, however, like to point out that while nt did a lot of telbombing several months ago, it was my impression that he backed off a while back, but i could be wrong.
Well, I hear that he won't do it anymore.
Re #12: "I use that program only when the other guy starts first" - It has been my experience that responding in kind to juvenile behavior is the best way to make it continue, and that ignoring it is far more effective if you want it to stop.
I don't believe that Sri was the person in question. The person in question has had many warnings, many attempts at reasoning, and used up quite a lot of (more and less) patient staff time. Nothing the staff has tried has worked to date. Just deleteing the login is useless because we have an open newuser ... a fact that this person has used to advantage several times. So, anyone got any inovative ideas?
This is the mail I got today..... Message 1/7 From Rani Aug 6, 97 04:59:44 pm -0400 Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:59:44 -0400 To: nt@cyberspace.org Subject: zero hi modda , kukka how are you? The meaning for this is "hi dickhead, bitch how are you?" So tell me..this guy is crown=krown=grown=arudhra. The guy who complained staff about me telbombing him. this guy works in NIC,Delhi India.
Being ignored will chase off mailbombers more effectively than almost anything else.
okay Mrs. Misti Anslin Tucker wants an Innovative Idea. Here's one I got.. All these days staff & me are like friends. Now one of the staff members is looking this issue thru a magnifying glass. Lets play this game safe. Do whatever you want either cancel my membership or delete my account I dont care. But pay me back all the money I donated to GREX. here's the list. I paid my membership fee in MAY. So thinking I'm a member to GREX for MAY,JUNE,JULY and AUGUST.. I Should get $36 from my membership fee. And I paid $91 in Auction and "Valerie" has donated her item but from "query undelivered" I see qt314 & jiffer have not donated their Item. So I Should get $69 and ask them not to deliver those items. I recently donated $100 for ISDN. So I should get $100 from ISDN. The total money GREX owes me is $36+$69+$100 = $195. I would really appreciate GUYS if you give me my money back before taking any decision on my account. If you dont wanna donate well..I will think I have donated my money to WRONG PEOPLE. Good Bye..
sorry my addition was wrong $36+$69+$100 = $205.
We normally try to deal with abusive behavior in private, and we specifically try not to bring allegations about individual users into a public forum such as this. This item was posted by a staffer who intended it as a discussion of how to deal with these problems *in general*. It was not out intention to name any names here. I am sorry it came to that. Sri, I appreciate your generosity in making those donations. You proved yorself a real friend to Grex, and you earned my personal friendship. However, as you know, you did not buy the right to harrass other users. I don't think the staff has ever wanted to remove your account or revoke any privileges. In fact, I am not even sure that the staff has the right to do that to a member. This needs to be clarified for me. Staff just wants you (and crown, and everyone else) to use the system in a responsible way. Your donations are not refundable, but I'd rather that you felt that there was no cause to justify any refund. If you aren't doing any telbombing (even in retaliation, because it doesn't matter who started it), then this issue is over, in respect to you. The general question of what do we do when a member misbehaves and refuses to stop still remains, though. That, I think, is the real topic of this item.
just as a kinda side note: in case of a tel bomb, is there any way to re-direct to tels you are receiving and send them back to whoever sent them?
so srw, my friend you mean to say this item is entered not for me but for general disussion. Then why I got this email from staff. Date: Mon, 4 Aug 1997 16:35:05 -0400 To: nt@cyberspace.org Subject: tel-bombs Cc: baff@cyberspace.org I've entered coop item 25 to ask about what to do about your continued sending of tel-bombs, even after you were asked to stop doing something that you know darn well you shouldn't be doing in the first place. And you are right that I shouldn't ask my donations back. But what to do when I goto party, people are saying that staff is gonna delete my account. Buzby says that ryan told her about this. But this is true crown=krown=grown=arudhra. and "rodamala" is a loser he needs to get a new JOB and figure out why his galfriend dumped him.
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.
Staff should realize, and encourage others who are under siege to realize, that there are software tools available to help with such harassment. If you *don't reward such behavior with lots of reaction and attention* it goes away. (I'm strongly agreeing with Jeff Kaplan who said the same thing a few responses ago.) I would really like to see the emphasis put on the users using the tools available to them and dealing with their own inter-personal problems rather than depending on staff to play mediator, policeperson, judge and jury. Grex can be a wonderful place to pick up people skills but only if we let folks learn what works and what doesn't.
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.
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.
(Mark, have you thought of becoming a kindergarten teacher? 8^})
I forgot how do read an exprgated item. Help me how to read that.
sri, at the respond or pass prompt, type "set noforget" and then "only 29" to read response #29. in #0, no names were mentioned. someone else accused sri of telbombing in a later response, which has pretty much derailed any chance of discussion about what to do with telbombers in general. the best way to deal with annoying people in party is to use the :ignore command. that's why it's *there*.
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.
some people aren't that great at ignoring things, even if its possible. And ignore doesn't shut off messages, which most people have to ask about. And the person still doesn't stop talking and being talked about. In a faint attempt to rerail the conversation, what have we done with chronic telbombers in the past? I recall encountering quite a few, it's not as prevalant nowadays.
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#36 Dont even think that Sri would ever ignore your emails. I read your emails and I thought of deleting those programs myself. Trust me after reading your emails I never ran that program against anyone. But I did kick that crown=krown=grown=arudhra in party. Also I never said that I'm a member of GREX and I can do anything. Instead I told many times in party that I'm a member I cannot talk dirty. But as you think crown is not female. The day you posted this in BBS I saw you mailing crown cuz he is running my program on me. He's such an ass he doesn't even know to use "change" program to change his name. I apologize for all this. Now I have included so many people in my .nowrite and I will be careful from nowonwards. But crown=krown=grown=arudhra the same guy. He's not female. He says he's female. But he's not. Listen this also. I did telbomb crown but not using "nt" handle. Its my other handle. Its "upyours". So crown got mad that day and created another handle "ubyours" immediately. He just want to defame me. Look at "f -m ubyours" and note the IP address. Its the same guy. Nobody till now know that "upyours" = "nt" except that guy who complained on me. But its my second handle and I telbombed this so called guy using "upyours". crown=grown=krown is mad becoause I told everyone they are same and he's not female. At that time I logged as "upyours". From Boston I logged to my Seattle office and from there I logged to GREX so that nobody will know that I'm "nt". He got mad and started sending me nasty tels. Instead of ignoring I hit this guy with /a/n/t/nt/cpp/ctel. He's smart enuf and found out that I'm "nt". Next day He logged as "arudhra" and started asking everyone in party how to send a telbomb. Valerie knows that I wrote a program to monitor party. I was monitor party and doing my office work. I looked at "arudhra's" IP he is same. At that time I was logged as "nt"/ I went to party and told everyone that he is crown. He got mad and sent me a nasty tel. So I ran my program on him. All he did was complain to STAFF. Frankly speaking I'm at fault. Why in the hell should I care who is he and what the way he speaks in party. I apologize for all this. I'm not even asking for REFUND. Whatever STAFF decides, I will obey that without any argument. Either cancel my membership or delete my account, I will respect STAFF's decision. Thats all I can say. But if you guys give me a chance trust me yu wont listen any complaints on me.
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.
It might be better to view a scenario such as this from a different angle.. lets suppose that I send it 6 or 12 bucks for a month or two's worth of membership, then start harrasing users with tel or write bombs. (write bombing is more "effective" than telbombing with the blocks in anyways, and once one starts there's no way one can necessarily block it). I don't use any of the membership priviledges, and deleting a login for me is useless--the ultimate demonstration of what open newuser gives us. How would staff go about things then? (come to think of it, doesn't STeve have some experience with situations like this?) Just a thought. It might be helpful to think about these things if more serious situations arise in the future (all things considered, problems here could be a lot worse).
They are to be expected in a community containing everyone from spoiled brats to testy codgers.
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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.
so in #4, garima asks what a telbomb is... and then , approximately two minutes later slanders a login! so there is a battle, suddenly. one thing about staff/baff - they don't identify specific logins and garima sure as hell ain't staff/baff. oh, garima; since you have now been let out of jail, have you sliced up anyone else?
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.
Ditto what Jan said.
Thank you for saying that so well Jan.
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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.
yeah please dont blame garima, she is innocent. Valerie sent me a mail saying that this item was entered to discuss about me. There is nothing to Hide. If win95 was here, he would have supported me, but he went back to India and now he is working in a company which doesn't have Internet Connection. So I asked some partiers who doesn't like that guy(who complained to STAFF about me) to support me and garima was one of them.
Re T.S. Taylor (tsty) #43 , I think : What the hell are you talking about anyway? I have no iea what you are imagining, but that was not slander. I was being supportive , yes. Sorry if I mentioned a name. Yeah, I dont usually use the work "kewl" . Alright. Well, Valerie, my motivation for offering my support was that I happen to think Nt means no harm at all and is a pretty responsible person. How do I know this? From interacting and talking with him. So there. I said it in my own words. Now , can we stop beating a dead horse into the ground?
I hope so.
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Ok then.
Hello, is there any action to specific member who campaign "DON'T PAY GREX" on th party channel? Apparently the same member also start telbombing? Regards (AW)
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We're going through this again? Wonderful.
Hopefully not.
type "f -m nt0". He is crown/arudhra who complained to staff about me. I guess he created this handle today :)
You have several choices: