Science

why is it that people from dragontalk always come here wanting to sell something or asking for us to send them random information when they've never even posted here before?

dear, troll; please send me 3 easy installments of 29.95 and i'll send you information.

heh..

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

I emailed the owner on Dragonwater Tea my opinions about tea talk and he was very defensive. He stated we should all try and help the new people to tea.

While I agree I also told him he should explain more about what a news group is and how it is used. Personally I feel it is cheesy on his part but that is only my opinion. I know others may feel differently about it. I don't ever see myself purchasing anything from his site though.

Mike

of an endless night.

Granted, but this isn't a forum for him to embellish his site to look more interesting or for us to provide a service to his clientele, this is a newsgroup and should be treated as such.

I wouldn't mind some sort of ban on his site or at least some kind of filtering process so we get less 'spam-like' messages. I'm not much to quibble over things like this normally, but it's starting to bother me. How about the rest of you?

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

i'm there. if this guy can't get it in his head that there are conventions and a protocol for newsgroups and respect them, he'll never get any business from me......p*

Basically, it's going to depend on your news reader. I don't think all the sites in the world would cooperate enough to block TeaWrecks.

My news reader will block on references, but not on originating sites.

What I miss are the days when part of the message ID was consistent for each individual. If you wanted to thunderplonk someone, you simply delete all messages with that unique string in the message-id or references headers. Boom. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer providers function that way, and few people are using a browser that lets them set such as string. Even news.individual.net has started randomizing the message-id header.

So many people are ignoring the conventions that the system doesn't work like it should.

Maybe if we bombard the site owner with e-mails voicing our disapproval of his interface (In a polite manner of course) And the fact that he will receive no business from regular poster of this group than he might take a hint.

Mike

I like it. How about 3000 emails? heh.

Or perhaps a partition?

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

I'm in!

Mike

of an endless night.

Now, now. Let us not engage in illegal activity in an attempt to stop the annoying.

The interface isn't the problem. The lack of explanation is. The site's visitors obviously think that the shop owners monitor the newsgroup. They don't. That should be made much more clear.

I believe that this would, in fact, clear up a lot of the confusion.

Actually, this doesn't look like a troll, or perhaps I don't understand the term's nuances. It reads more like someone hoping we'll write his/her term paper. In which case, $29.95x3 might be a little on the cheap side.

JMJO (just my jaded opinion)

I surfed there and found the following:

"Please read the Newsgroup FAQ before posting.

This is a free web interface to the alt.tea and rec.food.drink.tea newsgroups.

This service is unmoderated (except by spam filters). Use at your own risk.

Sponsored by the Dragonwater Tea Company."

One problem that I see is that it doesn't clearly state that it's a Usenet newsgroup. The other problem is that the link to the Newsgroup FAQ merely acts as a search and only lists the posts relating to the FAQ - it doesn't link to the FAQ itself.

One thing that I like is that our bitching and moaning is on his site. That's why I changed the Subject. After all, he is using our posts on his site w/o our permission - can anybody spell, "c-o-p-y-r-i-g-h-t i-n-f-r-i-n-g-e-m-e-n-t"?

I emailed Google asking if he's violating their Terms of Use #4 since his is a commercial site and we don't exist to service his website or customers.

"Unmoderated" does not mean "Unread." Unmoderated web forums allow anything to be posted, but that doesn't mean that the host of the forum doesn't participate.

In this case, the "service" is not only "unmoderated", it is "unmonitored" - that is, The folks at Dragonwater aren't going to pay attention to questions posted about their teas.

And those of us who are unassociated with Dragonwater aren't going to be able to answer those questions, either.

Sure, I can spell it. But this isn't it.

Providing a web based interface for accessing newsgroups isn't infringement. Google does it (much to the chagrin of those of us who realize that "Google Groups" aren't "Google owned"). News2web.com does it as well.

The problem here isn't infringment, it's spam due to misrepresentation. People are using the interface to post messages that should actually go directly to the owners of the shop, and not out to the rest of the word who is unassociated with the store and cannot answer the questions.

How would emailing Google affect anything? Is the store coopting their newsgroup feed for the site, or is it being taken from an independent NNTP server?

If he's violating their Terms...and Google's the best judge of that.

Google does the law now ?

Dragonwater is doing the same thing as Google, they are commercial websites giving access to usenet. The question is if we can blame them for having clueless users that more or less believe Dragonwater and Google are the names of 2 cool guys that answer to their questions.

Kuri

Notwithstanding that Tea Talk's link is a pain in the ass for us, their use is not copyright infringement inasmuch as all material posted on usenet is in the public domain. (the exception being the obvious: permissive use of formerly copyrighted material, clearly marked as "copyright etc.").

That doesn't stop it from being a nuisance...

Perhaps a weekly post with a subject header noting that this is not a Tea Talk forum and listing the URLs of his competitors might get the dirtbag owner's attention.

Yabut, yabut. Since Groups Help has a "How can I promote my group on my own website?" that says how to get HTML code to let people browse a group and how to subscribe to it, I decided it was worth a shot.

After all, we *are* listed in GG and there's a chance that the Team will at least be able to provide some advice on how we could handle dragonwater.