But, can you levitate, Mr. Wright? Can you levitate?
>
On 9/3/2014 8:04 AM, TurquoiseBee turquoi...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]
wrote:
Some who have avoided the common TM malady of having brain matter the
consistency of "the lightness of cotton fiber" :-) may have heard of
DoS -- a Denial of Service attack. That's where hackers and other
social perverts use technological means to keep users of a popular
site from contacting that site, or enjoying it. With companies or
guvmint agencies, a common DoS attack strategy involves setting up
automated phone machines to keep calling their customer service
numbers so the line is busy and no one can get through. With websites,
there are ways to set up a network of machines to keep banging on
areas of the site that use a lot of computing resources, so much so
that the site is slowed down and people can't access it or log on.
With chat rooms and discussion groups such as this one, another form
of DoS is to make the experience of being there so unenjoyable that
users who have plowed through it once never want to come back. One of
the best ways to do that is to flood the group with angry, hostile,
off-topic, and often-crazy posts -- and so MANY of these posts that
they can't be ignored. Most people *have* to slog through them, just
to get to any topics more interesting.
DoS attacks on the Web are now designated in the United States as a
form of terrorism.
I guess I'm trying to make the case that DoS attacks on discussion
groups are another form of terrorism.
Back in the day, *many* people brought up how these DoS overposting
attacks were ruining for them the experience of reading Fairfield
Life. It was such a pain to slog through the hundreds of posts made by
a small group (only 3 people, but who consistently made 30% of all FFL
posts) that many people no longer wanted to bother coming here. The
result of the discussion surrounding this mass exodus was the FFL
Posting Limits, which *succeeded* for some time in bringing the noise
level of the group down, and simultaneously improved quality in many
of the remaining posts. Fairly recently, some of the same people who
were responsible for the Posting Limits being created in the first
place (along with a few naive newbs like Share) lobbied to have them
removed, and Rick complied, largely because his co-moderator Alex felt
that "policing" the Posting Limits was too much trouble.
Voila. Here we are, a few months later, and ONE PERSON is now making
30% of all posts to Fairfield Life. Over 1600 of them, in the last two
months alone.
His constant cascade of crazy is seen by many people as a form of
terrorism -- a calculated DoS attack to make the reading experience at
Fairfield Life so terrible that its users eventually abandon it. I see
it as similar in many ways to another warped former FFLer's attempt to
destroy the group by posting porn to it and then notifying Yahoo. That
asshole was trying to get Fairfield Life taken down because he
disliked some of the things said on it. In my humble opinion, Richard
Williams is trying to do the same thing with his constant stream of
crazy. He's trying to destroy Fairfield Life by making at least 30% of
it unreadable.
Given how many people actually seem to support him, he may well have
already succeeded -- people are so used to the level of noise he
creates that they don't even notice it. Only time will tell.
I've started the ball rolling here (hopefully) by commenting on what
everyone else was ignoring, the elephant in the room, the person
talking so much and so loudly that it was clear he was trying to drown
out all other conversation. If that doesn't bother you, don't bother
to register an opinion or reply to this thread. If it does, appeal to
Rick and see whether anything can be done about this strange form of
Net terrorism and the creep perpetrating it.
