Tony Sivori wrote:

Who would have a reason to post this material periodically on
usenet?

Just because you may not like it, or it may be off topic, or that
it has been posted before does not make it spam.

A posting is spam if the poster's intent is not to seek an answer to a
question, or if the poster does not seek (or intend) to start a
conversation. This is especially true if the same post is made on a
periodic basis, and mischief is employed in the headers (ie - bogus
follow-up group list). Obviously, periodic posting of newsgroup
charters or FAQ's is not spam.

On Usenet, being BI 20 makes it spam. The OP is working on
it, but he isn't there yet.

I have no idea what any of that means.

That said, I'm not sure why the OP didn't post it to
misc.consumers.frugal-living where it would have been
directly on topic.

I have seen these anti-brand-name posts in groups other than
misc.consumers.*, where they are clearly off-topic.

My guess was that it is a website article, re-posted to
newsgroups verbatim. After searching Google, that doesn't
appear to be the case.

If you feel those posts are justified or above reproach, then so too is
my post asking who would have a motive to post them. It's an odd topic
to develop a posting-fetish over.

I think it is a decent post, and I agree with most of what it
says.

So how often, and in how many groups, is it legit to post it too?

I don't give a **** about generic vs brand name. I think anyone who's
got enough brain cells to be able to read usenet also knows enough about
the differences between generic and brand name stuff.

In fact, what's missing from that post is the nugget of information that
most every consumable product (procesed foods, shampoo, etc) are made in
a handful of mega-plants, and just before they come off the end of the
line they get slapped with various brand-name or generic labels. It's
more than just the idea that brand-name is frequently the same quality
as generic - it's that they're often made by the same plant.

By the way, New Guy, if it were spam you would have done the
spammer an enormous favor by re-posting the spam in its
entirety in your reply.

If it was such an enormous favor, then the spammer could have simply
posted it again today, and again tommorrow, etc.

But I don't think it was any favor to shine a critical light on his
posts, speculting why he's posting it, his motives, who he might be,
etc. I'm sure he doesn't appreciate that. But I don't expect he knows
because he doesn't participate in usenet beyond spamming it.

The spammer would be filtered on many servers and in many
individuals newsreaders.

The news server that I use does indeed employ one or two some-what
sophisticated and distributed spam-removal mechanisms. But the post in
question obviously was not picked up as spam.

By re-posting the entire article from your account, you
enabled him to effectively evade all filters.

My intent was to start a conversation about who he might be, and the
motives for his posts. If others did not see his original post because
it was filtered from their server, then my inclusion of his post serves
to provide an example that is necessary to further the conversation for
those people.