I haven't been posting/reading R.P.D much lately (shame on me)- but it
seems somewhere around 3-5 months ago someone started baiting others
on something like "how to properly do this". etc.  I can't remember
his name but I remember the first time I saw who I believe this guy to
be was on r.p.f+l with these *gigantic* signatures all about God and
just in general semi-insane rantings.  I noticed about the same time
the same sort of fodder thats perfect for baiting people into flames
showed up on r.p.d.  So's I sees it.

Ok- I think some people get sick pleasure in flamewars but Usenet has
been around a long time, and even since 'rn' there have been ways to
filter spammers (piping stuff through procmail, etc).  In otherwords,
before the "Internet" as we sold it, and during the UUCP days.

Anyway, I figured I'd throw a few cents in and recommend that everyone
use their killfiles religiously (and install a neat little program if
you run Windows).

I think a high percentage of people probably use Agent- so if you
haven't checked out this page, you should.  Its got pre-written
filters and examples for all kinds of ways to filter out irritating
things:

http://home.att.net/~JLBradley/REGULAR.HTM

If you already know regexp's then you're ahead of the curve..

Also, power-up your News filtering capabilities with a proxy:
(NewsProxy)

http://www.nfilter.org/

(Windows only, sorry)

NewsProxy is awesome because you can filter on a ton of stuff
(including NNTP-Posting-Host and Received From:, I believe even
Mime-Type which is good for filtering out all of WebTV ;)  ).  When
you can filter on IP, you can kill all sorts of irritating people.  

Most Newsreaders are severely handicapped when it comes to writing
intelligent filters on junk.

Newsproxy *should* work with all of the top (Windows) News readers
(Agent, Outlook, Xnews, Netscape,etc ).  Its just a proxy so you're
redirecting all News programs back to NewsProxy which filters and
returns the messages back cleaned up.

The logic in properly filtering out irritating posters should be
(imho) is to find the thing that changes the least and filter on that.
This may be relative to the poster (sometimes), but the IP address
most likely changes the least, or perhaps even less often the
Message-ID including the transit news peer (e.g):

Message-ID:
<11084-3F54CCA5-681@storefull-2131.public.lawson.webtv.net>

Filter on something that appears to not change:

*.public.lawson.webtv.net or *.lawson.webtv.net

In order for someone to get around that you'd have to change your News
peer dns name which would require reconfiguring ALL of your news
peering (thats a really big, irritating thing to do for a Usenet
admin).  Plus, no Usenet admin is going to change their DNS peer name
so some guy can flame newsgroups.  

Finally, say bye-bye to WebTV (only for example purposes, of course).


perhaps:

Mime-Version: 1.0 (WebTV)

filter on NNTP-posting-host: with Newsproxy to kill single ip
addresses (or entire ranges).  IP addresses change a lot less than
say, some w.nker that loves to change his from:

NNTP-posting-host: 1.2.3.4

etc

May the filter be with you...