On Aug 31, 1:14 pm, Mike Murray wrote:
On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:27:55 -0700, Bruce wrote:
The fakes have also made usenet history searches much more difficult.
This problem started back several years ago and yes on an unmoderated
forum it is a bigger problem, but the way that this problem used to be
handled was by having lots of active discussions and active
participnats with interesting topics. There were trolls who tried to
disrupt but they were drowned out mostly and some of them were even
funny and contributed important points or ideas to the discussions,
even if they were troll like.

I suspect recent activities were of a different nature. I don't
believe they were troll posts, but, rather, a Rovesque attempt to
influence USCF elections.

Just do a newsgroup search on "Sam Sloan" and you'll see what I mean.
The occasional witty parody, yes, but mostly huge numbers of short,
often obscene remarks about various chess personalities. Once one
determined the e-mail addresses of the fakes, they could be
bozo-filtered, of course, but many of them were "timely" in the sense
that they reflected close familiarity with current hot topics over on
the USCF moderated discussions and the BINFOs.

I'm starting to think the fakes were designed to fool or discourage
the casual web-surfer, perhaps a chess-parent or someone fairly
unfamiliar with issues of USCF governance, who might google, e.g.,
"Sam Sloan". Those people wouldn't think to search for valid e-mail
addresses, so they'll get flooded with all the fake posts, and
probably look no further.

We had them though back in the good old days too, but they often
started their own threads and everyone ignored them and they got bored
and went away.