"JR" wrote in message ...
But then, I figure if everybody worded their comments a little
differently, ROFF would be, if not entirely suffused with sweetness and
light, certainly a lot less lively.

JR

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The problem is that the vicious attacks that regularly fly back and forth in
this newsgroup are almost certainly of zero interest to anybody except the
protagonists. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know from a header what
is contained in a post without actually opening it and reading it; otherwise
I for one, would not waste my time opening many posts to this newsgroup.
The intemperate nature of contributions in recent times may have discouraged
new people from participating. Who wants to be insulted by someone who
doesn't even know them? It happened to me. And as others have noted, the
preponderance of off-topic posts may have caused many who used to post to
give up. I was actually beginning to wonder if OT should be re-defined as
"On Topic" and reserved for posts about flyfishing because sometimes there
seem to be far fewer of them than off-topic posts. This would minimize
wasted time for the (probable) majority not interested in reading about
American politics in a flyfishing forum and who are innocently looking for
talk about fishing. However, judging from recent posts, the worst of it
seems to have passed. Another observation is that the number posters seems
to be shrinking to a smaller and smaller core group- something is happening
and I don't think it is good. Maybe it is just Darwinism in play. I
disagree with your comment about wording, I don't think the discussions
would be any less lively if people were nice to each other because I think
more people would participate and more ideas would come forth.



Beat regards,



Yuji Sakuma