Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet Part 13

"I agree!"

or some such, often followed by a monster .signature (see section 4.5) There are a number of other Usenet denizens you'll soon come to recognize. Among them: Net.weenies. These are the kind of people who enjoy Insulting others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing newsgroup just for the h.e.l.l of it.

Net.geeks. People to whom the Net is Life, who worry about what happens when they graduate and they lose their free, 24-hour access.

Net.G.o.ds. The old-timers; the true t.i.tans of the Net and the keepers of its collective history. They were around when the Net consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire.

Lurkers. Actually, you can't tell these people are there, but they are. They're the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or respond.

Wizards. People who know a particular Net-related topic inside and out. Unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating system, for example.

Net.saints. Always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate the Net, they are not as rare as you might think. Post a question about something and you'll often be surprised how many responses you get.

The last group brings us back to the Net's oral tradition. With few written guides, people have traditionally learned their way around the Net by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on the Net itself. That tradition continues: if you have a question, ask.

Today, one of the places you can look for help is in the news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a place to learn more about Usenet. But be careful what you post. Some of the Usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to answer the same question over and over again. Oh, they'll eventually answer your question, but not before they tell you should have asked your host system administrator first or looked at the postings in news.announce.newusers.

4.2 KILLFILES, THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU

As you keep reading Usenet, you are going to run across things or people that really drive you nuts -- or that you just get tired of seeing.

Killfiles are just the thing for you. When you start your newsreader, it checks to see if you have any lists of words, phrases or names you don't want to see. If you do, then it blanks out any messages containing those words.

Such as cascades.

As you saw earlier, when you post a reply to a message and include parts of that message, the original lines show up with a > in front of them. Well, what if you reply to a reply? Then you get a >> in front of the line. And if you reply to that reply? You get >>>.

Keep this up, and soon you get a triangle of >'s building up in your message.

There are people who like building up these triangles, or cascades. They'll "respond" to your message by deleting everything you've said, leaving only the "In message 123435, you said:" part and the last line of your message, to which they add a nonsensical retort. On and on they go until the triangle has reached the right end of the page. Then they try to expand the triangle by deleting one > with each new line. Whoever gets to finish this mega-triangle wins.

There is even a newsgroup just for such folks: alt.cascade.

Unfortunately, cascaders would generally rather cascade in other newsgroups. Because it takes a lot of messages to build up a completed cascade, the targeted newsgroup soon fills up with these messages. Of course, if you complain, you'll be bombarded with messages about the First Amendment and artistic expression -- or worse, with another cascade. The only thing you can do is ignore them, by setting up a killfile.

There are also certain newsgroups where killfiles will come in handy because of the way the newsgroups are organized. For example, readers of rec.arts.tv.soaps always use an acronym in their subject: line for the show they're writing about (AMC, for example, for "All My Children"). This way, people who only want to read about "One Life to Live" can blank out all the messages about "The Young and the Restless"

and all the others (to keep people from accidentally screening out messages that might contain the letters "gh" in them, "General Hospital"

viewers always use "gh:" in their subject lines).

Both nn and rn let you create killfiles, but in different ways.

To create a killfile in nn, go into the newsgroup with the offending messages and type a capital K. You'll see this at the bottom of your screen:

AUTO (k)ill or (s)elect (CR => Kill subject 30 days)

If you hit return, nn will ask you which article's subject you're tired of. Choose one and the article and any follow-ups will disappear, and you won't see them again for 30 days.

If you type a lower-case k instead, you'll get this:

AUTO KILL on (s)ubject or (n)ame (s)

If you hit your S key or just enter, you'll see this:

KILL Subject: (=/)

Type in the name of the offending word or phrase and hit enter.

You'll then be prompted:

KILL in (g)roup 'eff.test' or in (a)ll groups (g)

except that the name of the group you see will be the one you're actually in at the moment. Because cascaders and other annoying people often cross-post their messages to a wide range of newsgroups, you might consider hitting a instead of g. Next comes:

Lifetime of entry in days (p)ermanent (30)

The P key will screen out the offending articles forever, while hitting enter will do it for 30 days. You can also type in a number of days for the blocking.

Creating killfiles in rn works differently -- its default killfile generator only works for messages in specific groups, rather than globally for your entire newsgroup list. To create a global killfile, you'll have to write one yourself.

To create a killfile in rn, go into the newsgroup where the offending messages are and type in its number so you get it on your screen. Type a capital K. From now on, any message with that subject line will disappear before you read the group. You should probably choose a reply, rather than the original message, so that you will get all of the followups (the original message won't have a "Re: " in its subject line). The next time you call up that newsgroup, rn will tell you it's killing messages. When it's done, hit the s.p.a.ce bar to go back into reading mode.

To create a "global" kill file that will automatically wipe out articles in all groups you read, start rn and type control-K. This will start your whatever text editor you have as your default on your host system and create a file (called KILL, in your News subdirectory).

On the first line, you'll type in the word, phrase or name you don't want to see, followed by commands that tell rn whether to search an entire message for the word or name and then what to do when it finds it.

Each line must be in this form

/pattern/modifier:j

"Pattern" is the word or phrase you want rn to look for. It's case-insensitive: both "test" and "Test" will be knocked out. The modifier tells rn whether to limit its search to message headers (which can be useful when the object is to never see messages from a particular person):

a: Looks through an entire message h: Looks just at the header

You can leave out the modifier command, in which case rn will look only at the subject line of messages. The "j" at the end tells rn to screen out all articles with the offending word.

So if you never want to see the word "foo" in any header, ever again, type this:

/foo/h:j

This is particularly useful for getting rid of articles from people who post in more than one newsgroup, such as cascaders, since an article's newsgroup name is always in the header.

If you just want to block messages with a subject line about cascades, you could try:

/foo/:j

To kill anything that is a followup to any article, use this pattern:

/Subject: *Re:/:j

When done writing lines for each phrase to screen, exit the text editor as you normally would, and you'll be put back in rn.

One word of caution: go easy on the global killfile. An extensive global killfile, or one that makes frequent use of the a: modifier can dramatically slow down rn, since the system will now have to look at every single word in every single message in all the newsgroups you want to read.

If there's a particular person whose posts you never want to see again, first find his or her address (which will be in the "from:" line of his postings) and then write a line in your killfile like this:

/From: [email protected]/h:j

4.3 SOME USENET HINTS

Case counts in Unix -- most of the time. Many Unix commands, including many of those used for reading Usenet articles, are case sensitive. Hit a d when you meant a D and either nothing will happen, or something completely different from what you expected will happen.

So watch that case!

In nn, you can get help most of the time by typing a question mark (the exception is when you are writing your own message, because then you are inside the text-processing program). In rn, type a lower-case h at any prompt to get some online help.

When you're searching for a particular newsgroup, whether through the l command in rn or with nngrep for nn, you sometimes may have to try several keywords. For example, there is a newsgroup dedicated to the Grateful Dead, but you'd never find it if you tried, say, l grateful dead, because the name is rec.music.gdead. In general, try the smallest possible part of the word or discussion you're looking for, for example, use "trek" to find newsgroups about "Star Trek." If one word doesn't produce anything, try another.

4.4 THE BRAIN-TUMOR BOY, THE MODEM TAX AND THE CHAIN LETTER

Like the rest of the world, Usenet has its share of urban legends and questionable activities. There are three in particular that plague the network. Spend more than, oh, 15 minutes within Usenet and you're sure to run into the Brain Tumor Boy, the plot by the evil FCC to tax your modem and Dave Rhode's miracle cure for poverty. For the record, here's the story on all of them: There once was a seven-year-old boy in England named Craig Shergold who was diagnosed with a seemingly incurable brain tumor. As he lay dying, he wished only to have friends send him postcards. The local newspapers got a hold of the tear-jerking story. Soon, the boy's wish had changed: he now wanted to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest postcard collection. Word spread around the world. People by the millions sent him postcards.

Miraculously, the boy lived. An American billionaire even flew him to the U.S. for surgery to remove what remained of the tumor. And his wish succeeded beyond his wildest dreams -- he made the Guinness Book of World Records.

But with Craig now well into his teens, his dream has turned into a nightmare for the post office in the small town outside London where he lives. Like Craig himself, his request for cards just refuses to die, inundating the post office with millions of cards every year.

Just when it seems like the flow is slowing, along comes somebody else who starts up a whole new slew of requests for people to send Craig post cards (or greeting cards or business cards -- Craig letters have truly taken on a life of their own and begun to mutate). Even Dear Abby has been powerless to make it stop!

What does any of this have to do with the Net? The Craig letter seems to pop up on Usenet as often as it does on cork boards at major corporations. No matter how many times somebody like Gene Spafford posts periodic messages to ignore them or spend your money on something more sensible (a donation to the local Red Cross, say), somebody manages to post a letter asking readers to send cards to poor little Craig.