The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

A Saturday, May 14, 2005 10:00 am to 3:00 pm & Waterioo Regional Police Headquarters, 200 Maple Grove Rd., Cambridge Home furniture â€" (519) 664â€"3301 1421 King St N., ST. JACOBS Frigidaire 1.5 Cu.Ft. ~â€" Microwave Oven * www.homeâ€"furniture.ca A community on the line n an earlier column, I Ihad written about the FreeCycle movement thip:/www.freecycle.org/}. a callection of onâ€"line mailâ€" ing lists that allow people to request items they need or to offer items they want to give away. Since then, L have folâ€" lowed the dayâ€"toâ€"day activiâ€" ty on a couple of local FreeCycle lists. Just over a month ago, a posting crossed my Inhox where a list subscriber was noting the fact that more people had been requesting items than people were offering. The message conâ€" tinued to suggest a way that the list could be made more fair... which sparked a flurry of replies to the mailing list from other members of the local FreeCycle community. Looking back at the some of the comments that had been circulated, it was clear that the list has become a miniâ€"community onâ€"line, where each person felt they should be heard. It was also clear that deviations from the "normal behavior" on the list might be met with corrections and reminders about the list‘s official policy. While the list does require membership approval, any member can actually post any message they wish, which can lead to unwanted messages. What occurred on our local list was actually fairly STORE HOURS: Monâ€"Thur. 8â€"6 Fri. 8â€"9 Sat. 8â€"5; Sun 12â€"5 + White __â€"_~=* Frigidaire > . Westinghouse ~ Dishwasher L ~Washer ; S@teroms..= en rs ce : enener sn tame compared to what often happened years ago on the USENET communiâ€" ties. If you are new to the Internet (say in the past five years or so}, you‘ll likely ask, "What‘s USENET?" While they are still in use today, USENET newsgroups were much more popular in the earlier years of the Internet. Using a newsreader proâ€" gram, you could subscribe to local or global groups, then read or post messages at will. Once posted, messages are delivered to the Internet and copied to servers all over the globe for others to read. In the USENET comâ€" munity, the practice of postâ€" ing a message to purposely create angry and fruitless replies was labeled "trolling" {back in the early 1990s). Many new users to the communities would not know or understand the "*s27Cift MICHAEL & °C M & "eÂ¥t‘e practice or etiquette of the groups, and would perpetuâ€" ate the group‘s misery with "fames", a label used for messages meant to be hosâ€" tile or insulting. With the trolls leaving "Hamebait" _ and _ the USENET "newbies" followâ€" ing up with "NDamewars", its a wonder USENET sull exists. But, as seen from our FreeCycle example, the vocabulary may change with the technology that an onâ€"line community uses, but that doesn‘t mean the problems go away. Blogs and onâ€"line forums often fall victim to SPAM postings... irrelevant mesâ€" sages that either advertise products or are an attempt to flood the server with messages. USENET users came up with the idea of a "killfile" which contained a list of words, phrases or patâ€" terns that a user did not want to read. Some newsreader proâ€" grams could use these rules t0 ignore messages and keep them from ever ending up on a user‘s computer. Today‘s blog and forum software can also contain functions for disallowing comments or messages if they match certain criteria. Some systems even incorâ€" porate Bayesian filtering which can be "taught" to Continued on page 24