Re: Moderation?

[John_L._Graham@adbbs.antioch.edu (John L. Graham)]

Hi Joe!
           I've been trying to bite my tongue too in fear of making eye
contact wth the problem. One of the things I enjoy about csa2 is it's small
enough to keep up with, and everybody knows everybody else. The problem with
csa2 is it's small enough one or two individuals out of the millions that use
Usenet can cause such an enormous problem. Fully 1/3 to 1/2 of the posts here
in csa2 the past few days has been a running fight between various
combatants. I'm in the process of connecting my ProLine site to Usenet and I
really wanted to offer my users csa2, but to be honest I'm seriously
rethinking that because of the huge volume of tripe this newsgroup carries at
the moment. There is hope, however, is the little bit of useful conversation
that sneaks through. The solution to this problem is simple, but requires a
great deal of self-control and restraint. Just as a neighborhood bully get's
a hormone rush over their distructive behavior being noticed we feed the
problem by responding to it. IMHO the best fix is to ignore, not even read,
and certainly _do_not_respond_ to the inflamitory posts. Hopefully, like a
virus, it will run it's course and crawl back into the hole from which it
came, usually to mutate and reappear and a more deadly and more viralant
form, but that's the nature of these infectious agents.

Ptui! Now that that fur-ball's out, time to get back to having fun and
getting stuff done on  my trusty-rusty IIs.

Speaking of fun, I think you would have gotten a kick out of our Apple II
display at ComputerFest '95. I had 7 Apple II's set up including at least one
example of every II from the II+ to the IIc+ (the GS is in there too). On top
of each one I put the date the computer was introduced. We had a LOT of
really nice remarks from folks that just forgot how old the Apple II was and
I think it brought back a lot of fond memories. Dozens of times each hour
(ComputerFest drew about 50,000 people this year) I had parents point them
out to their kids. "See kids, this one and that one are older that you are!"
It was fun watching parents show their kids play ChopLifter on the II+! In
fact, the joysticks were flying most of the day and we were one of the few
(if not the only) booth that let folks actually touch, let alone play, the
computers. heh, heh, for a couple of hours we even had ChopLifter and later
Air Heart on a BIG screen TV. Now that was neat!

Have fun!

John