Post by Barney RubbleToo many whack jobs out trolling on usenet (see what MX has done to
re.aviation.pilots for example). Usenet has had its day. It's sad to say but
moderated, closed forums (UK Flyer, PPRUNE, AOPA) yield a much higher signal
to noise ratio.
I suspect this is as much due to Micro$oft taking over the world (I
see you use Outlook Express) as anything else. I've been using Agent
since c. 1995 which does email and usenet and have never had any
problems. Silly people just go in the killfile and that's the end of
it.
I read pprune and flyer too and find plenty of people on there with
what I would call personality disorders, scores to settle, etc, hiding
behind nicknames just like in usenet.
In fact, some forums (flyer.co.uk in particular) suffer from a large %
of one-line posts which waste a great deal of time to wade through. I
would need hours per day just to read that forum. RSS is one way
around this; it gets close to usenet's efficiency. No idea if flyer
does RSS but pprune does. Pprune's RSS doesn't offer plain text output
though, without all the HTML formatting, which makes it slow.
The UK AOPA forum is nearly dead.
An interesting question is where one can find IFR pilots, or pilots
with any sort of real experience. I think the rec.aviation.* groups,
mostly American, are still the best place for asking a technical
question, despite the near lack of European content. I guess there are
plenty of other web based forums but I don't have time to even look
for them.