"Bob Paulin" writes:

I have pointed out that I, personally, do not understand the need
for killfiling, but others have their own reasons for the practice.

The kill file mechanism can be moderately useful at times, but is, as
you say, a tool one can use for one's own benefit, the use of it being
of no interest to anyone else. I might, for instance, choose to set
up my news reader to hide all threads in r.c.m with the words "forge"
or "weld" in the subject string, or I might have it hide postings from
you, including direct responses to your posting -- or entire subthreads
on the condition that you have posted in them. (I don't use a kill
file myself, but the news reader I use has an extremely sophisticated
implementation that can do these things, and much more.)

I do feel strongly, however, about the apparent belief of some that
you MUST broadcast to the whole world who and why you have killfiled
- or the whole killfile effort is, somehow, negated.

My recollection of this, from back in the early days, is that one did
not normally announce the use of a kill file to hide specific people's
postings. When done, it was done by posting a followup containing
nothing but the single phrase

*plonk*

which is the sound of a poster hitting the bottom of the kill file.
It was meant as extreme ridicule: it says that you find the poster so
totally worthless, that you no longer want to even know what he thinks
-- in effect, you make him an un-person in your own world. It had to
be used sparingly, of course, both because of the extreme severity of
such a statement, and in order not to dilute its meaning. Being
caught responding to a poster after having plonked him is, of course,
extremely embarrassing.

I guess the whole thing has lost much of its force over time, but, to
me, the verbose and frequent plonking we see these days looks mostly
like childish whining.

-tih
--
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, Senior System Administrator, EUnet Norway
www.eunet.no T: +47-22092958 M: +47-93013940 F: +47-22092901