I am a hobbyist and part time tradesperson who reads
rec.crafts.metalworking (RCM) to gain insights into metal
working techniques, tool reviews and other metal working,
with the exception of welding (I separately subscribe to
the joining/welding groups), related matters,

I used to find RCM a good source for such information.
However, over the last few or more months, RCM has become
nothing less than a board for anyone to post anything, related
or not, to metalworking. The number of OT posts has reached
spam proportions and my KILL file far exceeds the number of
daily posts to this group.

There are literally thousands of news groups available
where the majority of these OT posts appropriately belong, e.g.
politics, computers, terrorism, etc. I would like to ask those
who think this group is the only one to post in to please
consider that others may not want to read or even see articles
that are not related to metalworking. Your lack of
consideration is driving away those who have a serious interest
in metalworking and may just have an answer to a difficult
problem being posed but don't read RCM because of all the OT
noise.