Also, in the meantime, not all posts are propagated to all servers,
and various other things may well be different to the old Usenet rules
and etiquette.

The anti-archiving convention is now often not respected, and whole
forums and their posts and members are analysed by various people to
find out various things. If you don´t want this, then your only real
alternative is not to post to Usenet at all.

Using forums like the "fishing banter" forum I posted above can be
convenient as they combine various web facilities with Usenet posts,
and you can look at pictures etc etc.

Why they do it? I don´t know, but they will have some reason or
other for doing it, such resources cost money to provide and maintain,
even if this is done by fans of any particular subject matter.

I have no idea how they make money with it. There are so many scams
nowadays that it is impossible to keep up with them.

Probably the best idea now is simply to assume that everything is a
scam, until you know better.

TL
MC

http://www.mike1.bplaced.net/Wikka/HomePage