How Jude thought of OT . If I am not mistaken this post was made when Ronnie
Ruff and myself was engaged in a heavy battle. I have never forgotten how
much I disappointed my friend by arguing and ruining the group for everyone.
Hope others can learn from his post like I tried to.

These are Jude's words and post not mine taken from the Google Archive. Just
didn't want to trample any toes regarding copyright :-)

Newsgroups: misc.health.diabetes, alt.support.diabetes
From: jcro...@pobox.com (Jude Crouch) - Find messages by this author
Date: 1999/11/25
Subject: Re: The Group & Question of Value response

Well, I have a pretty unique perspective on this situation.

Some history.  About April of this year, a clueless bloke
issued a rmgroup for alt.support.diabetes .  That meant this
group disappeared from hundreds (maybe thousands) of news
servers thruout the world.

One of his objections was that alt.support diabetes had no
charter, and was duplicative of misc.health.diabetes, and
had no numerical justification.  Well I worked for several
weeks with the folks at alt.config to remedy the situation
and I was very glad that I could point to the actual postings
from before that date that were ON-TOPIC.  I created the
charter, then I re-created the group.  Then I spent months
trying to get news servers to pick up the group again.

The charter, which I post every Sunday, says in part:
 This newsgroup is for the emotional support of persons with
 diabetes mellitus, their families and loved ones.  Specifically,
 this group is not intended to duplicate the information in
 misc.health.diabetes, and not intended to dispense advice about
 the disease.  Nor is this group intended to duplicate the group
 alt.food.diabetic, which discusses recipes for the sufferers of
 diabetes.

This why I have in the past asked that you refrain from posting
recipes (there is a group for that) and not to crosspost between
misc.health.diabetes and a.s.d.  Pick the group that is most
relevant to the message and post there.  Humor that is posted that
has nothing to do with the topic hurts the group.  It doesn't
belong here, it belongs in a joke group.

This isn't to say that humor doesn't belong here, Gregory Gadow's
explanation of why Wolf didn't use as many lancets as the pharmacist
though he ought to was hilarious and definately on-topic.

Why should this be important for all of us?  Because the only
thing we own here is our words.  We are borrowing the facilities
of thousands of news servers around the world.  We need the
cooperation of the administrators of those servers to maintain
good propogation of the newsgroup.  And we must continue to
try to get even more servers to carry the group.  That is easier
when we can point to an excellent on-topic record (they refer
to it as the signal-to-noise ratio).  A group with high signal
and a low noise is preferred by them.

The rules in alt.* are that anyone may create a group and *anyone*
may issue rmgroup.  We don't want anyone to have a reason to
remove the group, so we have to be good `Net citizens.

This (a.s.d.) is not a moderated group so there is no way any poster
can be stopped if they want to continue with off-topic posts.
But I would recommend that for those of you who need a touch
of humor daily, have Nathan e-mail you one each day.  Just
send him your real e-mail address and request his jokes.  I'm
sure he will accommodate you.  I am sure Nathan knows how to
set up a list in his address book of his mailer.

Respectfully.

Jude