misc.transport.road

[US71]

I own James River Armoury

I've heard of you. I've seen some of your stuff on-line, as well. Very nice work.

[flowmotion]

I used to be a regular lurker on MTR until a couple years ago. I thought about checking it recently, and discovered you can't even navigate to Usenet groups from Google's home page. (Now, trying it again, it brings up the "old" google groups by default.) So, it wouldn't surprise me if Google terminated this service.

I will say that MTR survived about 8 years longer than most usenet communities.

[oscar]

It was Andrew Cuomo, when he was Spitzer's attorney general.

I thought it was Spitzer when he was AG.

At any rate, he was going after child pr0n and the binary groups are a leading source of it. So instead of just dropping the offending groups or the alt.binaries.* hierarchy in general, a lot of ISPs just dropped Usenet altogether. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Yeah, the problem was that since the alt.* hierarchy was unregulated, the "offending groups" kept changing and it was hard to keep chasing after them.  By that point, Usenet was dying off on its own, and ISPs couldn't be bothered with a more nuanced policy; easier to just drop Usenet entirely, since few users would change ISPs as a result.

I occasionally check m.t.r. and occasionally post there, but mostly it's a waste of time.  The other Usenet groups I followed, either the trolls have completely driven out most of the remaining intelligent users, or the moderators of one small but useful group just shut it down completely.  I'll probably drop Usenet entirely in the next few months. 

[Quillz]

I like to visit MTR every now and again, but very rarely post. Just as described, it's basically overrun by spam, political and religious fighting, etc.

Usenet is most useful nowadays for piracy.

[Mdcastle]

One thing about MTR:

A certain poster "Tom from Ohio" would write "So and so, do us all a a favor and **** off, posts full of tirades directed at well-respected members.
Did we ever figure out who it was or what the motivation was?

[Alps]

One thing about MTR:

A certain poster would write "So and so, do us all a a favor and **** off, posts full of tirades directed at well-respected members.
Did we ever figure out who it was or what the motivation was?

Welcome to Internet trolls.

[hbelkins]

One thing about MTR:

A certain poster "Tom from Ohio" would write "So and so, do us all a a favor and **** off, posts full of tirades directed at well-respected members.
Did we ever figure out who it was or what the motivation was?

I know who it was, and was apparently one of the last to know, but Tom himself fessed up to me. He did it mostly for fun.

[bandit957]

Did we ever figure out who "Gillespie from Florida" was?

[Scott5114]

One thing about MTR:

A certain poster "Tom from Ohio" would write "So and so, do us all a a favor and **** off, posts full of tirades directed at well-respected members.
Did we ever figure out who it was or what the motivation was?

I know who it was, and was apparently one of the last to know, but Tom himself fessed up to me. He did it mostly for fun.

"Tom" actually posts to this board, but as to their true identity, I shan't say unless they want to share it themselves.

[hbelkins]

Did we ever figure out who "Gillespie from Florida" was?

Who?

[bugo]

Did we ever figure out who "Gillespie from Florida" was?

Who?

I know, but I'm sworn to secrecy.

[hbelkins]

Did we ever figure out who "Gillespie from Florida" was?

Who?

I know, but I'm sworn to secrecy.

I have no memory of a "Gillespie from Florida." But I checked the MTR archives on Google Groups and found a response to a thread in which he posted, which said this:

Trolls, just like terrorists, have as their major goal to disrupt the lives
of others. Posts like yours are doing exactly this, and are giving the troll
the win.

Anybody wanna guess which type of interchange who posted that?

[adventurernumber1]

Just browsing the web, and I actually came across "Roadgeek" in the urban dictionary:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roadgeek

Whoever this "Tom from Ohio" guy is, it looks like he wrote the first definition. Although apparently this was done in 2003, and I certainly don't know for sure if this is the same guy. Just has the same name.