Newsgroup Censorship by Rob Mitchell

Rob Mitchell, a regular poster to the chess newsgroups, especially
rec.games.chess.politics , has come up with an interesting way to
thwart discussion of any topics he finds objectionable: He changes the
subject headers, so that anybody who has been following the discussion
will not be able to see what happened to it.

At first I thought it was happenstance that threads I had been
following would suddenly disappear. However, when this happened five
times yesterday, I figured out what was going on.

For example, two days ago I started a thread entitled: "Should Bill
Hall be fired over the latest Beatriz Marinello affair?"

First, Mitchell claimed that my statements were not true. Then, when
asked to explain what he meant by that, he wrote something about
wetlands and insurance policies, which had nothing to do with the
subject at hand. Simultaneously, he changed the subject header to:
"Zoning issues and wetlands at USCF construction site".

By doing this, he obliterated the original subject header. That is how
it works on the Google newsgroup reader at
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.chess.politics

Note: On other news readers, such as Free Agent which I am using now,
this will not work.

When somebody objected and changed it back, Rob Mitchell immediately
changed it again, this time to "Thread changed."

When asked why he had done this twice, he replied: "the conversation
changed and it would have been improper to have posted under an
incorrect header. Just because others are lazy does not mean that I
will do the same."

However, it was Rob Mitchell who himself who had changed the
conversation. Nobody else had expressed interest in his new subject.

This subject was changed back and forth three times yesterday. Each
time somebody posted under the original subject header, Rob Mitchell
changed it back.

The new subject header, by Rob Mitchell, is "Thread changed."

You can see that it is about the second or third topic down at
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.chess.politics

Similarly, in another topic Rob Mitchell did not like, he changed it
three times to
Subject: Just Say No

You can see this now about twenty items down from the top. Although is
has 256 posting to that thread, there have been none more since Rob
Mitchell changed the subject header a few days ago.

Rob Mitchell posts as "Rob"

Yesterday, he took several times to lecturing us on web etiquette and
even implying that we would receive a warning if we kept changing
these threads back to their original subjects. He even provided us
with "A primer of how to post on the usenet":

However, I believe that it is Rob Mitchell who has been behaving
unethically, not us.

Sam Sloan

U¿ytkownik "Sam Sloan" napisa³ w wiadomo¶ci
...

However, I believe that it is Rob Mitchell who has been behaving
unethically, not us.


Sam, of course Rob does not follow netiquette in this regard but ask
yourself if your cross-posting is ethical and follows netiquette ?