The problem is that Fred Cherry was the type of highly offensive poster who inspired multitudes of people to send in one flame apiece - and X-no-archiving has helped obscure just how long those threads were getting. By the time they would even have heard from me, my reminder would already have been addressing a moot point. But, beyond that, let's do the math. There were about 14,000,000 people on Usenet in those days and Fred was hitting some of the most heavily traveled groups. Conservatively, 10 % of the Usenet population could easily have been witnessing his bigoted spams. Now, let's say 1 % of them - only 1 % - decided to respond to him. That's still 14,000 people. That's 14,000 letters for me to type, if I do it by hand, before all of the incoming contributers to Cherry's thread have been reached. And you wondered why his threads went on as long as they did, right?

For comparison's sake, that's several times the number of posts I've made in about a decade of Usenet posting, even if one counts crossposted material multiple times - and this, I was supposed to do quickly enough, to end the followups in a timely fashion. Now, let's say that a miracle occurs, my mild case of cerebral palsy goes away, and I can type and send each of those letters in two minutes. Then, if I were to type 16 hours per day, I could complete my task in a mere 29 days and 4 hours.

Or, I could ignore Tim, and just make a followup, as I'm told people have been doing on Usenet, since Tim's idea of a big time, was chasing an ice cream truck. Let's see if you can guess which choice I made.

It was a hard call. On the one hand, I could be doing my homework (in grad school, they kind of expect you to), having a social life, eating, bathing etc. On the other hand, I could appease an obscure freshman in Champaign, Illinois (whose online behavior was so obnoxious, and went so far beyond the norms of civil conduct that by his own account he was repeatedly in trouble with one branch or another of the UIUC administration) by doing something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I decided to go with the former choice. Go figure.

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