I think a large part of CG's issues is the forum itself. I'm an administrator on another forum and the posts that have been appearing on CG showed up on my forum. The forum I'm on and probably HB are more advanced, when a troll is zapped they stay zapped. I don't think CG is quite as sophisticated as HB and the one I'm on.

Hey Randy! I am completely lost at your strikeout in red line. What do you mean by -the troll-?

Randy kindly omitted the name of the guy who is responsible for making alt.coffee intolerable. I fear naming him is like saying "Beetlejuice" three times and ask that nobody do so. Thanks!

Michael Keaton is the troll?

Your comment made me chuckle really hard.

I'm curious how a person could make a USENET group intolerable. I figure anyone who cared could use a Newreader with filtering capability (my fav was Mt-Newswatcher). Simply set rules for the offender and never see their posts again. While you might still see posts of those who were inexplicably compelled to respond to the troll, a little judicious filtering dramatically increased the signal to noise ratio.

Filters only work for existing logins, but if the troll is willing to creating new logins, multiple times per day, it becomes an annoying war of attrition. And trolls aren't always so obvious that filtering will help. Posing as multiple people and engaging in sockpuppet games degrades the quality of the discussion; the sockpuppet troll will eventually be found out and taunt those he/she mislead into "helping".

Ah, that makes sense. The groups I subscribed to were mercifully devoid of such tactics for the most part. I actually don't really recall alt.coffee (I was a bit late to the game; didn't get on till 1995). The coffee related group I used was rec.food.drink.coffee.

The Agent newsreader, not a free program, will easily deal with the troll issue. The downside is you really do have to read the docs to be able to see the full capability as it is more than a simple filter.

Add in that the internet has gotten so much smarter and recognizes probable spam before it makes it to the light of day and it kind of says if Alt.coffee were to begin today they could be better protected. It's not unusual for me to find trouble being held by my forum looking for human intervention on what should be done with a maybe troll. Now it's pretty easy to look at an IP for having caused trouble in other areas on the net and block them.

We have a neat trick for returning trouble, it's called silent mode. They see their post but no one but mods/admins can see it. So, they can post away to their little heart's content without causing damage to the forum members.