http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/

1. The American Remonstrator – This person, usually, but not always, a non-American. He is greatly annoyed and offended by America, Americans and everything about the USA and its citizens.

Sometimes he has a real beef, or a valid point, but that is really secondary to his main aim, which is to assert his own superiority by constantly deriding others. The USA as a powerful, and at the moment, violently inept county, is a perfectly safe target. Most non-Americans and a goodly number of Americans will agree either enthusiastically or ruefully, with whatever attack the American Remonstrator makes.

The Remonstrator often belongs to the “Know It All” category. Which you would have known if you hadn’t gotten such an inferior education in the American school system.

2. Captain America – This USA patriot actor violently disagrees with The American Remonstrator. He’s prolific, tireless, verbose and insane. Any criticism, no matter how well-grounded, is in the end met with “We saved your ass, you craven surrender monkey.” or “Shut up! We could SO nuke you.”

Captain America makes it impossible for others to respond to the American Remonstrator in a calm and rational way, since Cpt. America proves the Remonstrator’s point for him most of the time.

Cpt. America is usually a subset of “Persecuted Idiot” or “Can’t Let Go”.

3. The Loveless Misogynist/The Braggart Misogynist – Crowbars vile descriptions, epithets and unlikely sexual acts and conquests into any conversation. This person is usually a teen covering their abject fear of females with truly repulsive porn-informed language. Sometimes, though, you get a sense that some aren’t, in fact, lonely porn-obsessed teens, but lonely porn-obsessed adults. These people are sort of scary and best avoided.

He’s also usually a douchebag.

4. The Troll – The troll doesn’t really have any opinions. He just wants to wind people up and get them upset. He loves flame wars and people leaving in a huff. He’ll say anything at all to achieve that, often changing his position to insure maximum unpleasantness.

The problem with mocking those people is that Murphy guarantees that in your paragraph mocking them, you will inadvertently misspell a word. It’s a law of the universe.

I was trying to deal with organization, heirarchy, chronology, and automatically “ranking” (filtering / censoring) a poster’s content depending on what a fuck-head he is, but… it all gets data heavy very quick and requires a lot of user tools and participation. In the end, I failed, then gave up and went to a flat chronological view.

I intend to try harder next time, but… I agree with you. As a developer of such things, however, I haven’t figured out how to solve the various message board problems. I also haven’t seen a good implementation of a message board online. My exposure to usenet has always been through web sites that expose it (like google groups). Maybe I need to dig up tm and get some inspiration from the older tools.

i used to love trn. so sad that usenet is now just a way to distribute mostly copywritten, mostly porn video content.

(Ironically, though, I don’t miss Usenet.)

Also, the tiny little “go to the first new message” buttons do not count as a decent interface because they are usually teeny weeny and hard to hit.

It’s obvious that the link to the thread should always just show me only new messages, and the tiny button should be for showing me all messages if I choose to later.