"The Old Bear" > wrote in message
news
> shipwreck > writes:
>
> >From: shipwreck >
> >Newsgroups: rec.food.baking
> >Subject: Moterator
> >Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 18:37:16 GMT
> >
> >I'm being fined by my host site for a complaint against me from a
> >memeber of this group. It was one post, after participating here for
> >over a year, and now I've got the internet police after me.
>
> If Roadrunner (rr.com) has done anything to enforce its Acceptable Use
> Policy, it comes as a great surprise to many of us.

I'll second that. I have had RR for about 5 years and they aren't even
interested in helping you when someone is trying to hack into your system.
That said, I can see the abuse department telling a customer to go figure it
out himself. RR is mostly bullshit. No matter what your problem, when you
call them they make you wade through several levels of customer service reps
who all read from a script. The first thing they do is make you reset your
modem and reboot your computer. You can be on the phone for an hour before
they finally open a work order and get you to a level 3 tech. At that point
they often have to call you back. If you aren't home, the whole process can
start again. If someone is trying to hack into your system, they won't even
talk to you on the phone. You have to email them a copy of your firewall
log and they will only accept the log if it is in ASCII format. You get an
automated response and they never do anything. RR is all about making the
customer jump through hoops.

I have corresponded with Shipwreck for some time. I can tell you that I
don't think he is the type of person who would flood newsgroups with
solicitation to buy his products. I didn't see anything that appeared to be
spam that he posted to this NG, but my threshold may be higher than others.
We all make mistakes. I don't understand why people are being so
aggressively nasty about all this.

A couple of years ago I visited a new superstore that had just opened in my
area called "The Great Indoors." It is similar to the Home Depot "Design
Expo," I thought the place was amazing and huge. It had lines of
appliances and cabinets that I had only seen in magazines like Architectural
Digest. I wrote a short messages here about how impressed I was, and
someone accused me of posting spam. Someone said that the message was a
slickly written promotion piece planted by the marketing department of the
store, written to appear as coming from an ordinary consumer! I was stunned
at what seemed to be a case of paranoia. Considering that I had been
posting to several food related newsgroup for some time, I was also
perplexed at how a person could come to such a conclusion.