XPost: news.groups 
 From: jtbellj3p@presby.edu 
  
 [I'm crossposting this over to news.groups, and setting followups go to 
 there only, because that is where people who are interested in "newsgroup 
 management" hang out.] 
  
 In article , 
 Carrie  wrote: 
 > 
 >  Is there anything anyone can do about this? I've heard that it's almost 
 >impossible to have a ng closed/removed at this time, but someone else said 
 >that one was closed and to look into how that was done (she asked about it 
 >here and was told this) 
  
 I was the one who told her about it.  misc.jobs.offered was in fact 
 removed by such a vote, but it was a rather special case.  It was not a 
 discussion group, but a group intended solely for job advertisements.  It 
 ended up being used as a free worldwide-distributed database by job 
 recuiting agencies, who robot-posted thousands of ads per day to it. 
 There were so many postings that no human could actually *read* the group 
 in a normal fashion.  It was by far the biggest non-binaries newsgroup on 
 Usenet, and many news server administrators considered it to be an abuse 
 of the newsgroup system.  It got the votes for removal on that basis, and 
 as I recall very few people voted to keep it. 
  
 Hmm... let me look it up in the news.announce.newgroups archive at 
 ftp.isc.org...  ah, here it is:  29 November 2000, misc.jobs.offered 
 removed by a vote of 170 to 14. Fourteen "no" votes is a very low number 
 even for a non-controversial proposal. 
  
 I think in this case (talk.religion.course-miracle), if there are 
 indications that the group is being used for something at least vaguely 
 related to its original purpose, and the proponent seems to be waging a 
 campaign to artificially inflate the votes in favor of removal, it will 
 probably win a number of "sympathy" votes against removal from news.groups 
 regulars, in addition to the votes from you and people like you. 
  
 >    Does this happen often with ngs? One person gets mad over something and 
 >tries to close the whole thing down? 
  
 I've never seen anyone go as far as actually submitting a removal RFD, no. 
 I was rather surprised when it appeared. 
  
 -- 
 Jon Bell                      Presbyterian College 
 Dept. of Physics and Computer Science        Clinton, South Carolina USA 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)