OT stuff, archives

[Bill Ballard]

At 7:46 PM -0800 2/12/04, Phillip Ford wrote:
>Uh, apparently I spoke a tad prematurely.  This present exchange almost
>makes me long for the good old days when Bill Bremmer was on the
>list.  Guess it's time to set some filters.

A neat trick with filters. You may find yourself wanting to simply 
filter out an incoming email address (read: low-life loudmouth), but 
are hesitant because that person does add significantly to the 
technical discussion, material which we would miss. (Bill Bremmer was 
an excellent example of this BTW.) Go ahead, set your filter anyway 
and dump everything this person posts in your trash box. If they do 
say something brilliant, or post a question which starts a Grade-A 
thread, you won't miss it. Someone else will quote them, and if you 
need to read the original, it'll be there in your trash box. (Oh yes, 
I have to take out the trash manually, but if your is done 
automatically, set it to dispose of stuff over a week old. That 
should be plenty of time for a worthwhile post from this scum-bag to 
show up on your radar.)

At 7:19 AM -0600 2/12/04, <dm.porritt@verizon.net> wrote:
>This list has spam and porn filters.  They look at the text of 
>messages for specific words and hold-for-approval all messages that 
>contain them.  I'm wondering if we should add words like "Bush" 
>"Kerry" "Dean" "Clinton" and "elect" to the spam filters.

I elect to bush the keys after changing the keytops. This was taught 
to me by the dean of key repair in the northeast, Frank Stopa.

This discussion comes around frequently, why can't somebody else be 
in charge of this list so that everything in my PTx mailbox fits my 
definition of what should be there. (I thought the movie "Bad Boyz 
II" would have been first-class with say 45 minutes of car chases, 
gunfights and fuel-tank explosions deleted. But the movie would have 
been a flop with its intended teenage market.)

But we won't be able to find a full-time human-being-type moderator. 
Andy has told us how much work is involved manually cleaning up just 
the header inaccuracies (never mind, editorial matters). And we 
couldn't put together a committee to make a set of global filters 
which everyone would be happy with. (Why is there all this bickering 
among religious beliefs as they play out in civil life in this 
country. Can't the government write one prayer that we'll all use?)

Welcome to democracy (and all of its constituents). We're in charge 
of the quality of this list. That starts the posts each of us sends 
off, and continues with the filters that each of us sets up for 
ourselves.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

"The truth is inside you, Don Octavio. I cannot help you find that."
     ...........The mother of a delusional patient to his psychiatrist 
in "Don Juan DeMarco"
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