No, you don't "know" that.
I fully agree that it is worth trying to reason with a person when they
are doing something that many people dislike - in many cases, they are
unaware of the problem, and are happy to try to change to suit others.
But persistently and repeatedly moaning at the same poster is highly
unlikely to help. Certainly I have never seen it helping, and certainly
I have seen it aggravating the problem and irritating many other people.
For most people, there is little practical difference between the
person regularly posting nonsense, and the person posting a reply to
every nonsense post.
And while some problem-posters (such as Ramine) don't seem to be at all
concerned about whether people read, reply to or ignore his posts, there
are many who only post to bug people and provoke them. In such cases,
they will continue to post as long as they get replies - when they are
consistently ignored, they will go elsewhere.
> I've seen newsgroups killed by posters such as Ramine. Look at
> alt.computer.consultants, for instance. It used to be a great group for
> consultants, with lots of on-topic posts daily. Now it's completely
> dead because people like Ramine drove everyone away.
>
Certainly Ramine and his like are a problem in Usenet. But the solution
is for others to make other posts and discussions, rather than to get
overly concerned about such characters. There is no reason to suppose
that alt-computer.consultants would have survived as a viable group even
if Ramine was not around - many groups die off through lack of
interesting posts, rather than due to an excess of pointless posts. It
is simply that when there are few good posts, the bad ones stand out more.
>>>
>>>>> Just because YOU don't see his posts doesn't mean everyone else doesn't.
>>>>
>>>> No one using decent servers such as
news.Individual.net and
>>>>
news.aioe.org see its postings, just the pointless replies.
>>>>
>>>
>>> So you're saying the only "decent" servers out there are ones which drop
>>> his posts? ROFLMAO! Just what I would expect from you, Ian.
>>>
>>> Here's a clue. There are lots of "decent" news servers out there. Some
>>> of them might even drop YOUR posts.
>>>
>>
>> I would not consider a public news server that dropped Ian's posts to be
>> "decent". But certainly there are many good servers (such as the very
>> popular
news.eternal-september.org) that don't drop Ramine's posts, as
>> it is unlikely that they fall foul of the basic requirements for
>> blacklisting. After all, he is not posting phishing links, or adverts
>> for body part enhancements, or anything of that sort. He is posting
>> about software and algorithms in software development groups - some
>> people may find his posts interesting (despite his terrible posting
>> habits), and it should be up to individuals to choose to filter him or not.
>>
>
> You might not consider it "decent", but someone else might. It's all a
> matter of perspective.
True.
>
>> Individuals may also choose to have local news client rules that kill
>> all threads or subthreads started by particular posters, so that they
>> skip replies as well as posts.
>>
>>
>
> Which only solves the symptom. It does not cure the problem. And these
> types of posts have a tendency to drive new people away.
>
Sometimes treating the symptom is the best we can do.
There is no possibility that complaining to Ramine will help in this
case. But by all means contact
news.eternal-september.org and report
him as a spammer - if they cut his access, then that will cure the
problem (at least for a while, and in this particular case).