sf wrote:
> Doug Freyburger > wrote:
>
>> Kill files are a blame-the-victim approach ...
>
> Did you mean to say "blame-the-victim" approach? There's no shame in
> using a kill file.

Read some tirades against people who use a service that does not offer
kill files. Read some tirades against people who have not learned to
use their filters. Where the shame is is in not using kill files. And
that's why it's a blame the victim approach. The reader who is already
assaulted by messages that would have been handled by customer service
anywhere but Usenet complains on the group and is then doubly abused for
being ignorant not just of Usenet but also of their own custom loaded
software or lack thereof.

> The only posters who are against it are those who
> don't have the capability to kill and are too lazy to change or they
> are the perpetrators. Personally, I love kill files. Not only do I
> kill posters, I also kill key words for trolls/spam and I kill
> legitimate threads I'm not interested in reading or become bored with
> after a while. Some people call it killing "noise".

Agreed on all that but none of it alters the fact that abusive messages
make it to the user for processing rather than being handled at the
customer service level and then anyone who complains about this simple
fact is abused for complaining. It's a wonder Usenet has seen a single
new poster in the last decade with how frequent such abuse is.

My filter blocks based on number of cross postings. Some high noise
groups I drop all cross posted messages. Trolls add cross posts to off
topic groups hoping to generate replies by people who do not notice the
addition. At the moment I use a reader that asks me to confirm any
cross post by me and offers to only post to the group I'm reading.

I also filter based on the names of groups in the list. Numerous
groups are troll magnets. Plus I filter anonymizers, certain rogue
servers that are known to host a high percentage of trolls. I also use
the !ignore verb to drop all responses to certain known trolls.