"Bill Becker" > wrote in message
...

> Beer related material is crap?
> Dang, I just don't understand this hostility!

If you'd been around here half a dozen years ago or so, you would. When the
Alstroms decided to start up their Beer Advocate thing, they started off
with an email newsletter. One of the ways they got their mailing list was to
grab the addresses of regular rfdb and alt.beer posters and start sending
them the newsletter, unsolicited. When asked to stop doing so by several
people, instead of being men about it and saying "sorry, we thought you'd be
interested but we shouldn't have sent this to you without asking, and we'll
take you off our lists," they kept up with sending people their newsletter
and made multiple excuses about how they weren't the ones responsible that
several of us who asked to be removed kept getting their newsletter.

To some of us, their origin is in part from spam. Add in the fact that all
they really do here is drive-by post, and then whine once or twice a year
about how usenet is dead, and many of us are suspect of their approach.

They do run a fine website; I use it from time to time if I'm traveling and
curious about places I may want to check out. They have, from what friends
have told me, done a good job with the beer festivals they run. I have no
problems whatsoever with their running a website, or that it's popular. I do
have some issues with how they do things in these particular two newsgroups,
and have done them historically.

This also happened during a period where a multi-year troll account was
uncovered - somebody that was deeply hostile to many people here, including
threats of violence that extended to phone calls to certain members. There
was also a rash of people getting signed up for a lot of newsletters
following disagreements with people in the newsgroups. The Alstroms were in
no way responsible for the troll account and chaos that caused, but what
they did WRT their newsletter and their lack of a simple "oops, we shouldn't
have done that, we're sorry" just contributed to a lot of mistrust at the
time.

That's where the "hostility" you see comes from. It's pretty much ancient
history as far as I'm concerned, and I pretty much ignore what comes from
the Alstroms on these two newsgroups, and my only issue is people who simply
post stuff from other sources and don't actually contribute to discussion.
I've had this issue with other posters in the past, so for me, it's hardly
an Alstrom thing. Fortunately, it's easy to ignore.

But all the nonesense from back then was targeted at certain people quite
strongly, and if there are people who still have issues with things all
these years later, I can't say that I blame them.

As always, things are much more complex than they initially appear.

-Steve