On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux, in article
<vaXij.36021$JD.18150@newssvr21.news.prodigy.net >, Ericus Lin wrote:

>As a Slackware user, I see a lot of bullying when I browse
>Slackware-related fora; I jumped to conclusions. Mea culpa again...

If you are referring to the alternative group 'alt.os.linux.slackware',
I did try to follow that group for a while, but gave up as there was no
useful posts, and the regulars there delighted in flaming anyone and
everyone in preference to offering help. Apparently, useful posts are
against the newsgroup charter there.

>>Some of the groups I need to scan also have significant troll
>>populations, and the filtering improves the signal/noise ratio.

>Ha! Signal/noise ratio. Hilarious...

A polite but accurate description of the problem.

>This is true; I could use some filters. I'm just afraid that I'll miss
>a topic I would otherwise want to read.

Obviously, choosing the correct filtering rules takes some experience.
A decent newsreader (or spooling tool like leafnode or slrnpull) can
trivially filter on 8 headers (From:, Subject:, References:, Date:,
Bytes:, Lines:, Message-ID: and Xref:), while others (such as
User-Agent:, Newsgroups:, NNTP-Posting-Host:, or similar) take much
more bandwidth, and CPU cycles.

[compton ~]$ grep -vE '^([%\[ ]|Score|$)' /var/spool/slrnpull/score |
cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | column
932 From: 23 References: 2 ~Subject:
2 Lines: 306 Subject:
15 Message-ID: 80 Xref:
[compton ~]$

>Still, I'm finding cancellation messages annoying, as do the many,
>quick, thoughtless posts that litter the politics groups to which
>I am subscribed.

Cancellations probably can be filtered by Subject or From header, but
political groups are bound to be war-zones. The trolls and other
abusers can usually be filtered by the From line, but sometimes the
Message-ID and References headers prove useful.

Old guy