Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Thu, 2 May 91 22:12:16 GMT From: Amanda Walker Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: GEnie Management Acting a la Prodigy Management? Message-ID: Organization: Visix Software Inc., Reston, VA Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 330, Message 1 of 9 Lines: 44 CRUZ_A@ccl2.eng.ohio-state.edu writes: [about GEnie vs. Linda Kaplan] > Soooooo, here we go again with the issue of censoring certain > materials in large online systems. Or is it really an issue? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Sigh. From what I understand, this is one of the more annoying recent developments on the timesharing service front. Here are the facts as I understand them: From her messages on GEnie, Linda Kaplan presents herself a quite annoying person with no sense of humor and precious little sense of how courtesy applies to public communication. A "sysop" of one GEnie round table (who is responisble for being a pseudo-moderator, keeping discussions on track, putting out flamewars, etc.) got sufficiently irritated with her behavior on his round table that he locked her out of it for a while. Linda subsequently started complaining, and roudned up support from a large group of ex-Prodigy people (who are, after all, quite reasonably sensitive to electronic censorship). Unfortunately, these people then assumed that GEnie management was just like Prodigy management, and started jumping to conclusions and making "pre-emptive" accusations to GEnie and GE management. This, needless to say, did not do much to endear them to GEnie management, especially since this "debate" (combined with Prodigy-style volumnious Email) evidently ended up causing resource problems within GEnie. I do not know if it has been resolved, but I will be quite annoyed if a bunch of disgruntled ex-Prodigy users end up instigating a self- fulfilling prophecy, and turning the best public timesharing service I have used into a hostile environment, or shut it down completely (which GEIS might well do if GEnie ends up being too much trouble). I have quite a number of people of friends who depend on GEnie (one of whom is hearing impaired and uses email as her lifeline to the outside world), and I resent people screwing things up for everyone else because one person cried wolf. Amanda Walker amanda@visix.com Visix Software Inc. ...!uunet!visix!amanda