response 1 of 31:

Feb 7 07:14 UTC 2002

   I agree it would be wonderful to be able to clean dreck like polytarp's
cruft out of existence, but it isn't going to work.  Not with Grex being
an open system.  To do what you propose, you'd destroy what we are.

   The more attention paid to twonks like him the better it gets for him.
Very much like throwing gas on a fire.

   I would like to strangle people like that at times, Russ.  I'd cheerfully
sick my six cats on them--after dunking him in tuna oil.  Unfortunately, we
can't.  ;-)

response 3 of 31:

Feb 7 13:50 UTC 2002

Russ probably approves of that idea.

A technical fix might be better.  Is there any way to augment the "fix"
command so you can fix all responses by a given user?

response 5 of 31:

Feb 7 15:51 UTC 2002

april21 is apparently going to be a regular visitor, there was a new 
ad from her in the music conference, item #74.

response 7 of 31:

Feb 7 18:50 UTC 2002

No it would not help to delete the account, s/he would just create a new one.

response 9 of 31:

Feb 8 00:20 UTC 2002

It's not in his constitution to let stuff go.

response 11 of 31:

Feb 8 04:41 UTC 2002

Re #3:  <jp2> Quit being a fuckwit asswipe. </jp2>

Re #2:  Not so.  The people doing this have no interest - and usually
no method - of hiding their tracks.  Spammers have to leave addresses
of some kind.  The only people who could hide are twits on dial-up.

Re #1:  Prevention would be nice, but it would be just as nice if a
few twonks wound up buying Grex a better Internet connection and some
new hardware.  Why should their stupidity cost them nothing?

Unfortunately, we can't take advantage of the pockets of idiots if
we don't have the appropriate policies in place.  Technical measures
are nice (I've got some very effective ones myself) but they only
benefit people who use Grex the way I do.  Being able to hand out
"speeding tickets" benefits the system as a whole.

Re #6:  And nobody's deleted them yet?  That's one place where a
fair-witness can save participants the bother of filtering.

response 13 of 31:

Feb 8 15:00 UTC 2002

Same here.  In over ten years of Agora, I can recall only one other
instance of spamming similar to the "twill" incident, and that was
about nine years ago.

response 15 of 31:

Feb 10 04:18 UTC 2002

Re #11:  So you don't support verifying users?

response 17 of 31:

Feb 12 01:50 UTC 2002

Re #15:  Not for Grex's purposes, no.

Re #14:  On the other hand, Steve, it might be worthwhile being able
to recover damages from an identifiable twonk.  I'm just saying that
Grex should have the policy foundations in place to seek recompense
should that occur.  It might help; it sure can't hurt.  (Do we have
to *sue* to recover monies due under the terms of use, or just bill?)

FYI, I counted 88 non-forgotten newresponse items on the session
with the "twill" nonsense (which I skipped using a modified twit
filter).  But suppose that someone was reading with Backtalk, and
did not have filtering available.  Further suppose that it took
10 seconds to click the "next" link and wait for each new page to
load.  That's 880 seconds, or almost 15 minutes of wasted time.

That's *per user*.  Multiply by probably some hundreds of users and
by some reasonable hourly rate for their time ($10.00 is sensible, but
for many $40.00 is not unreasonable) and we can get a figure of
several hundred to ~1000 dollars damages aggregated over the user base.  

Let's put that pain where it belongs.

response 19 of 31:

Feb 13 00:16 UTC 2002

Re #17: In this context you're going to have to sue, even if you try to 
bill.  Think about it.  Unless the person was dumb enough to give 
newuser their real identity, finding out *who* to bill would require 
going to court to get the records of their ISP.  After that, if you 
bill them they'll almost certainly just ignore it.  Then you'd have to 
go to court to get them to actually pay.  Considering that it'd be hard 
to prove Grex had actually lost any money as a result of their actions, 
winning isn't a certain thing either.

response 21 of 31:

Feb 14 10:51 UTC 2002

resp:17  Yes, I use Backtalk.  No twit filter, sorry, unless one is 
built for us into the interface that we can toggle on/off.

response 23 of 31:

Feb 17 20:11 UTC 2002

   Russ, the problem I have with giving someone a bill for cleanup is
that the person who'd cause the need for the cleanup is exaqctly the
type to ignore it.  Without enforcement of some kind we'd never see
anything, and I fear we'd spend more time on twonk control policies
than Grex maintanence.