I would like to suggest that all of you regulars of alt.home repair
take a look at the newsgroups rec.boats and rec.boats.cruising. I
have used the internet since the 1980's. Long before the days of the
World Wide Web. This newsgroup as well as the rec.boats groups were
well established before I found them.

The usernet has always been a favorite hiding place for internet kooks
and trolls. They have almost completely overwhelmed rec.boats and are
now slowly destroying rec.boats.cruising.

In both rec.boat groups it was simply a matter of the troublemaker(s)
posting off topic subjects of a political and personal nature that
many of the less restrained members could not resist responding to.
The resulting flame wars have driven off most of the serious users so
that now both groups are little more than a bunch of kooks doing
everything possible to annoy each other.

One of the biggest Off Topic troublemakers in the rec.boats group goes
by the names Harry, Harry Krause, HK and probably a few others. He
also likes to spoof the id's of others to stir up trouble when people
don't respond to his posts or trolls, which is what it is all about in
his case.

Anybody on this group notice our Harry's. We seem to have a few. Some
of our Harry's post normally. Some of our Harry's start threads like
this:

Interesting UK hand gun link

Obama, dictator of America.

The end of the world is nigh!

Take a look at the state of those other newsgroups before you decide
to respond to this one.

If you are a Harry and consider yourself a serious user of this group
I apologize for dragging you into the thread. If you are the Harry
that posts off topic would you please explain why you find it
necessary to do so. You do know there are many political newsgroups
that would welcome those posts?

For the rest of the home repair users, you have now seen what the
trolls can
do to newsgroups. You can continue on as usual or you can possibly
think first before responding to a troll. Google Internet Trolls if
you need a little more convincing that there could be a problem.

To the Harry troll

I can understand why you people would go after the rec.boats group. In
short they deserve you but that's another story. Why would you want to
come after this group? They're just a bunch of ordinary people from
all walks of life. They mean no harm to anyone. They're just looking
for simple homeowners advice or are willing to help others with some
of the same. I really can't understand why you or others like you
would get any enjoyment out of attacking a group like this?

LdB