> Anyone care to comment on why it managed >to kick around on the UNIX side of the world for so long without >anything really being done other than sounding off? USENET is generally accepted to be an anarchy, where the only possible response to a perceived (or perception) problem is to "flame" to as wide an audience as possible. As an example, a professor here, by the name of Webber, is so widely regarded as a source of wasted bandwidth that a newsgroup named "comp.bob.webber.is.an.asshole" was publicly suggested, and almost created, with the sole purpose of screaming about him. The idea of screaming loud and long is to embarass the management of the source site, in this case "portal.com", into taking action against the offender. Unless the site is a particularly good network citizen, this often has no effect. It has, however, resulted in a significant software solution: the "rn" newsreading program has a "kill file", in which you can list (among other things) users whose mail you don't ever wan't to see. When Webber writes, half of USENET never even notices, since he made it into their kill files long ago. Ross Patterson Rutgers University >>> Item number 121, dated 88/05/27 13:47:52 -- ALL