- Banning someone from a CompuServe forum is a matter of assigning a software setting, known as a "flag," to that member's numbered user ID that tells the forum software not to let him or her in. Forum sysops have fairly wide discretion in these matters, but you are expected to consult with the product managers assigned to your forum, who can advise against it if they feel the member's behavior isn't egregious enough. Ultimately, though, it's up to the sysops: CompuServe seen close up is more like a collection of tiny kingdoms than it is the seamless monolith it appears to be at first. <back to text>
- "Net.Legends FAQ (Noticeable Phenomena of Usenet)," maintained by David DeLaney and archived at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/legends <back to text>
- There's a well-known sophisticated UNIX command called grep that allows you to search files for specific text strings; a couple of Usenet legends have used this to scan an entire Usenet feed and collect all the articles using a particular word. An entire religion, kibology, was created this way by a Usenet poster named James Kibo; he used to grep all of Usenet for his name, and then would answer postings unexpectedly. For more see alt.religion.kibology <back to text>
- Maintained by M. Legare and archived at http://www.wetware.com/mlegare/kotm/ <back to text>
- Deja News ( http://www.dejanews.com ) is a Usenet search service that holds archives of all of Usenet since early 1995. Many people are concerned about the loss of privacy involved in allowing permanent archiving of messages written in the expectation that they would be ephemeral. The X-no-archive header is easily inserted by typing in "X-no- archive:yes" at the top of Usenet postings before they're sent out, but too few people know about it and some new archiving services don't honor it. <back to text>
- Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, T wo Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society," Village Voice, December 21, 1993. Reprinted with other related material in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, edited by Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 1996), 376-95. <back to text>
