psychoceramics: strategic mailbombing

[David Fleck <dfleck @ uog9.uog.edu>]

For those interested in real-life, real-time Usenet drama, you might want 
to check out sci.bio.ethology -- currently the site of a massive two-way 
battle between the usual residents of the group and Archimedes Plutonium.

Background:  s.b.ethology is gated to the ethology mailing list.  It's an 
open gate, with unmoderated traffic going both ways between the mailing 
list and the newsgroup.  A.P. started posting his "humano-ape" stuff to 
it, and mailing list members started to find more and more A.P. right in 
their own mailboxes.  Being A.P., any attempts to politely redirect his 
posts elsewhere were met with obscenity-laced diatribes impugning the 
sender's mathematical ability.  (Any attempts to address his points were 
met with the same.)  Finally, he started posting excerpts from the 
Dartmouth Film Society brochure about movies he'd seen recently.  

Apparently sensing that this tactic, if pursued, would really piss people
off, A.P. posted a 20Kb+ review of the movie "Pather Panchali".  This
finally caused several people to snap -- rather than ignore him till he
got bored, these people decided to go on the offensive by bouncing back,
as e-mail, anything that A.P. posted.  This tactic was taken up by
numerous members of the mailing list.  This gave the satisfaction of
knowing that for each post of A.P.'s, he would receive 10 or 20 or more of
the same posting in return.  

This did seem to get A.P. riled up.  He retaliated, in turn, by
immediately posting the returned posts to sci.bio.ethology (and therefore
back to the mailing list).  So at the moment, sci.bio.ethology consists
mainly of reposts of reposts of reposts of reposts of reposts of snippets
of the Dartmouth Film Society's essay on "Pather Panchali", intermingled
with obsenities and insults.  The mass-mail-retaliation tactic of the
ethology regulars seems satisfying, at least at first; the source of
annoyance receives his just desserts in like coin, multiplied 10 or
20-fold.  However, in the long term, this is a contest to the death- the
massed efforts of the mailing list versus the implacable and indefatigable
crackpot.  Who will win is an open question - but the future of
sci.bio.ethology may be decided this very week... 

    David Fleck                      (d--@u--.uog.edu)
    Division of Natural Sciences     (671)735-2795/2780 fax:734-1299
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