Assignment

[gmend...@gmail.com]

The name of the group I wanted to look more into was
alt.support.obesity. The group wanted to help people loose weight and
give them different options to do so. I saw different post that told
people where to eat and gave different links on websites with videos
on different exercises that can be done in helping loosing weight.
Some issues I saw a lot were things such as diabetes and not being
able to loose weight. I saw many post stating that they went to a
doctor and the doctor told them that they were diabetic or were on the
verge of being diabetic and these people really wanted support from
other people that may have gone through the same thing and advice on
how to help maintain the diabetes or keep it from really affecting
their life. Other issues I saw were wanting to keep the weight off and
asking for help on how to do that. The serious posters seem really
cool and really interested in giving or receiving help. These people
seemed to have joined the group to get a sense of companionship in
their journey of loosing weight. When it comes to gender you can’t
totally tell but you can look at their screen name and it can give you
context clues on what their gender is. I think geographic locations
are diverse. I would say that about seventy-five percent of the posts
are from Americans or American bashers. In my opinion this group could
be very helpful because once the people got comfortable enough the
posters could meet in a gym together if they lived in the same area
and really have constant support from people in person and online. The
serious posts that I saw were really helpful and seemed really genuine
in the purpose of helping the people that had questions or concerns of
weight loss. On another note I know that we were not suppose to take
into consideration the spam that was sent but I must admit I read a
few of them because they caught my eye. It really saddened me that
people seem to hate obese people. The post I saw really hurt me and I
wasn’t even apart of the group. The things that were said were so
hurtful and I feel as though if I were in this group and was in it for
help I would get depressed and maybe would quit the group. I feel as
though the group should get the post pre-approved in order to keep the
support group clean and “safe”.

[Hugh Watkins]

moderation tends to kill usenet activity

this group is D E A D dead

normal activity for effective groups is about 10 to 20 posts daily

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.big-folks/topics?hl=en is
also dead and full of spam

Hugh W