Upon reading one of my newsgroups this afternoon, I came upon the following message :
I might understand this is it were just one group, but the same person has posted in the respective groups that rec.arts.animation and rec.arts.disney.misc will be removed as well.
Does anybody know is this is for real? Is there going to be a purging of some newsgroups? Or is someone just dicking with us?
My gut reaction is that it’s somebody screwing w/ the group. What’s with that Dilbert line? That reads suspiciously like the nonsense that gets spewed out by Hipcrime sporgeries. As of 7pm EST, the newsgroup is still there.
I doubt it’s for real…if a Usenet group is going away, there are countless RFD (request for discussions) followed by a vote. It’s loud, it’s intrusive, it’s noisy, you can’t miss it.
If you follow the group regularly and don’t recall tons of posts with RFD in the thread title, it’s probably B.S.
( least that’s the way it worked when they got rid of some of rec.arts.comics* groups)
Fenris
I saw something like this in rec.arts.comics.strips as well. Well, I didn’t see the original notice–all I saw was a reply. This probably means that spam filters ate the original.
Looks like BS to me.
It is completely impossible to remove a Big 8 Usenet newsgroup. I’ve seen people try, it can’t be done. Once a group is established, it is almost impossible to remove it from every newsserver on the net. Even if you go through the whole CFP/RFD/vote process, and execute a valid rmgroup, many servers do not accept ANY rmgroup commands, and the newsgroup will continue to exist and propagate.
In other words, they’re screwing with you.
I’d say that this line alone is proof that it’s BS.
Even groups that DO get rmgrouped will hang around on a lot of news servers forever.
Also, did you mung the supposed originating address? ‘orikpyp.edu.cn’ doesn’t seem to have a web presence (though that doesn’t NECCESSARILY mean anything), and reads suspiciously like the fake addresses used by spammers (some random series of letters, followed by a legit, though not neccessarily common, TLD)
Of course the other posters have given other reasons to consider this a load of poopy, but more proof never hurts.