Judah wrote:
Is it just me, or is there a full moon out or something?!?!

I have an observation based on another newsgroup. Around 8 years ago,
I was idly thinking about going skydiving, and followed the group
rec.skydiving for a while. I recall there was the standard baseline
amount of arguments and such that you get on any Usenet newsgroup, but
mostly it was people talking about the jumps they'd been on, discussing
the gear, techniques, places to jump, etc. Life happened and I didn't
end up jumping at that time.

Fast forward to about two years ago. I get interested again and go back
to rec.skydiving to check it out. Just looking at the recent and new
articles, the group seemed to consist of three or four people flaming
each other. I dug into the archives at Google a little and found that
most of the discussion was now taking place in the forums on a Web site.
I checked out that site and ended up becoming a fairly active member of
the forums. I don't like the interface of most web-based forums - the
first requrirement for designing one seems to be to throw away everything
learned from 20+ years of Usenet on how to have an online group
discussion - but in this case, I wanted the content enough to put up
with the interface.

Like most Web sites with forums, there are several topical forums - one
for general discussions (like r.a.piloting), several for specific
subtopics (like r.a.ifr or r.a.homebuilt), even some in languages other
than English. There are also two forums for "off topic" discussion.
One is for general chat, and the other is for debate on topics that are
often controversial - religion, politics, guns, etc. The (volunteer)
moderators on the site are not bashful about moving a post, thread, or
part of a thread from one forum to another if the content changes
drastically, so the forums stay pretty much on topic.

The forum software displays the grand total number of posts on the main
page of the forums. This January it hit two million posts. I was bored
(winter weather, so no jumping) and decided to do a little analysis of
the post counts, thread length, etc in the various forums, and I found
something very interesting: About two-thirds of the posts on the site
were in the "general chat" and "controversial issues" forums. In other
words, around 66% of the discussion on the site had _little or nothing_
to do with jumping. My first thought was "I wonder why the guy that runs
this site puts up with this... two-thirds of the posts aren't even on
topic!" But then I realized - if you _don't_ have those forums for "off
topic" posts, people _will_ make them anyway in the forums that _are_
available. I think this is what you are seeing in r.a.piloting right now.

Usenet sort of has a mechanism for this. The talk.* groups are designed
for the kinds of debates that go around and around quite heatedly, like
religion, politics, guns, etc. People could post messages there if they
wanted, but since those groups tend to attract vocal supporters on all
sides of a question, it's not a good place to post if you want lots of
people to agree with you. What I think happens is that posters in a
newsgroup like r.a.piloting see that other posters mostly share their
views on the main topic (aviation) and then assume that other posters
will also mostly share their views on other topics, including
controversial ones. So they include "off topic" comments in their posts
with the expectation that many other posters will agree with them.
Sometimes these comments arise out of discussions about flying - in most
countries, if you fly, you have to interact with the government at some
level, which easily leads to comments about government, politics, etc.
Other such comments come out of left field somewhere. No matter where
they come from, the result is the same - the original poster gets
surprised when the other posters turn out to have the same wide range of
opinions that people in general have.

Understand that I am not singling out any one poster or group of posters
here. I think that assuming that those who share your views on one
topic will also share your views on other topics is a "human nature"
thing that everybody does to some degree. I'm not sure if this is
something you will ever be able to fix in software. I am specifically
_not_ suggesting moderation of all of the rec.aviation.* groups, nor am
I suggesting that the discussion on the rec.aviation.* groups be moved
to Web site forums instead. Putting things like "OT" or "POL" in the
subject line works for a little while but then gradually becomes
ineffective. One informal metric that I use here is that when a thread
has more than about 30 posts, it's probably past the end of its useful
life, but I have seen much shorter "useless" threads and much longer
"useful" ones.

Or, if all of the above is too deep, just take it as part of the natural
ebb and flow of the newsgroups. Or even simpler: This too shall pass.

Matt Roberds