Richard Henry  wrote: 
  
 >"Arthur L. Rubin"  wrote in message 
 >news:4141B06A.6EE9@sprintmail.com... 
 >> Kathy Cole wrote: 
 >> 
 >> > Gentlemen, it really isn't necessary to followup each post to identify 
 >> > the perps.  It's obvious they're trolls, and the repeated identical text 
 >> > is spam. 
 >> 
 >> Agreed.  Repeated idential text is one of the types of spam. 
  
 >Disagreed. 
  
 >If one is making comments about the nature or content of significant 
 >postings, and the nature or content of those postings is sufficiently 
 >similar, then the comments may become identical. 
  
 It still ends up being labelled as spam.  If such comments occur 
 at a frequency similar to spam (say, if we use BI), then they aren't 
 worth making, they aren't adding anything to the discussion and 
 are adding to bandwidth unnecessarily.  It may well be called 
 spam simply because it fits all the qualities of spam (unless 
 you argue that spam must be commercial, which I don't agree with). 
 If I post one of my RFD critiques 50 times in one week, what have 
 I accomplished with numbers 2 to 50?  Nothing good.  I would flood 
 the RFD thread and annoy folks who have to keep stepping through 
 the thread until they find something different than the stupidly 
 repeating critique.  I will have ensured that as many news.groups 
 readers (including proponent, supporters, and opposition) as possible 
 saw my critique, which is exactly what spamming is intended to do. 
 I would be just as unhappy if 49 people quoted my critique in its 
 entirety followed by just an "I agree" simply because the critique 
 is not seeking consensus and such postings are a waste of bandwidth 
 that ought to be used for discussing the points made or missing in 
 the critique.  If a morphing troll or a gang of trolls did just 
 that, then it would probably be labelled as spam.  The kind of 
 content isn't a criterion for spam, the major criterion is 
 repetition. 
  
 ru 
  
 -- 
 My standard proposals rant: 
 Quality, usefulness, merit, or non-newsgroups popularity of a topic 
 is more or less irrelevant in creating a new Big-8 newsgroup. 
 Usenet popularity is the primary consideration. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)