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          and keep on going. In the event that you do find that you're
          getting flamed an awful lot, you may wish to consider your
          presentation: even if you're saying perfectly reasonable
          things, a lot of people will have trouble with what you're
          saying if you 1) sound like you think you speak for all
          humanity or 2) keep saying the same thing over and over instead
          of listening to how people are responding to you and responding
          yourself to what they say.
          
          Contrary to popular belief, there is no requirement that one
          respond to each and every flame directed one's way. Even if
          someone stoops so low as to call you a "pompous spamhead" or
          impugns your ability to make use of groceries that haven't been
          pre-chewed, you are still free to ignore it and get on with
          your life; in fact, doing so is often recommended, since people
          tend to skim a lot of messages and running across a whole
          stream of articles arguing over whose head bears the greatest
          resemblance to lunchmeat is a lot more likely to leave the
          casual reader with the impression that you _are_ a pompous
          spamhead than one or two ignored flames would have. Responding
          to flames and personal attacks tends to focus attention on
          them, which encourages those who flame you and is likely to
          make casual readers see you in a worse light. So, when in
          doubt, ignore the flames and respond to the articles that
          inspire you to say interesting and thought-provoking things.
          
   Hey--someone just posted a personal ad to soc.singles! Should I flame
   the pants off this person? 

          That depends; if you can think of a wonderfully witty and
          entertaining way to flame the ad, go ahead; otherwise it's not
          generally worth the trouble of putting up a public post about
          it for the whole world to read and it might be better just to
          send a note to the poster in email suggesting that this is
          uncool. If you do want to respond publicly, you might want to
          change the subject from "lonely speedboat owner seeks fellow
          marmalade enthusiast" to something more like "No Personals,
          Please (was: lonely speedboat owner seeks...)"; that way people
          just scanning the topics or reading the newsgroup with nn or
          other newsreaders that just show you the subjects unless you
          select the article won't get the impression from reading the
          headers that personals are the mainstay of soc.singles--plus,
          those people who don't want to read the flames generated by
          personals can just put "/No Personals, Please/:j" into their
          killfiles.
          
   Soc.singles is just full of flaming and angry-sounding people this
   week; can't you guys all just get along? 

          Not everybody logs onto the net to meet people and enjoy
          friendly conversations; a lot of people just enjoy being
          obnoxious and feeling like they have a lot of power and are
          really cool if they can piss other people off, especially if
          they can get someone else to lose his or her cool and act like
          a twit too. Posting a message saying that somebody like that is
          a rude and annoying twerp with no social skills and probably
          has the personal hygiene normally associated with week-old
          roadkill isn't going to make them rethink their ways, it'll
          only encourage them.
          
          On any newsgroup, if you don't like flaming and angry words,
          don't add to them; what you write is part of the newsgroup just
          like everybody else's articles, so the best way to make the
          newsgroup have the style you enjoy is to post the kind of
          articles you'd like to read if they'd been written by someone
          else.
          
   Sometimes I write stuff that is just so incredible I think I should
   crosspost it to every other newsgroup on the net. Is that OK? 

          No. In general on any newsgroup, crossposting should not be
          done more than necessary. Inevitably, when you crosspost a
          discussion about your taste in swimwear to soc.singles,
          alt.personals, rec.scuba, rec.nude, and alt.culture.urdu, the
          thread will quickly diverge in directions that most of the
          groups don't want to read about. If you do this too often,
          people from the various groups will start showing up at your
          house and tearing up your flowerbeds. If you reply to a message
          that is crossposted, be sure to trim off the newsgroups for
          which your reply is not appropriate or at the very least set
          the Followup-To: field to the group for which the subject
          matter is most appropriate.
          
          Unfortunately, the net tends to attract people who can't get
          attention or satisfaction in life except by cross-posting
          obnoxious and self-important messages all over the place in
          hopes that someone will pay attention to them. Usually it's not
          worth bothering to reply to these sorts of articles; the
          original author probably doesn't care what you say or have much
          interest in reading it, but simply enjoys knowing that you were
          annoyed by it enough to respond.
          
   What is this "editing" stuff I keep hearing about? 

          "Editing," which is most commonly used in the phrase "please
          learn how to edit your messages" refers to deleting unnecessary
          quoted material. It's not at all unusual for newcomers to the
          net to reply to long messages by quoting the entire thing and
          then responding to a comment made somewhere in the middle of
          the original post by adding a single sentence onto the end.
          It's much better to delete quoted text from the original
          message if it isn't necessary to what you're trying to say.
          Remember that many people out there, when they see huge reams
          of quoted material that obviously hasn't been edited down, will
          simply skip over to the next message without bothering to read
          your sterling prose at the end, so a little attention to the
          mechanisms of cleaning up quoted material will help you get
          your points across. Also be sure to delete any quoted material
          left at the end of your message--it's easy to respond to
          something in the middle or even the beginning and forget to lop
          off the quoted stuff at the end that you aren't responding to.
          
          Don't be too industrious when deleting text, though--be sure to
          leave enough quoted text so that the readers will know what
          you're talking about even if they don't remember the message
          that you're responding to and be careful not to trim off the
          attributions (the names of the people saying the things you're
          quoting) that go with the text you leave in. (Do feel
          encouraged to remove the names of people whose comments have
          been entirely deleted, though.)
          
   How about editing subject headers? 

          This is an important and much-neglected art. Often the topic
          will have strayed far from its original one and a discussion on
          gerbil rolfing will be carried out under the heading "Favorite
          skiing lingerie." When this happens, it's entirely appropriate
          to change the heading to something a little closer to the topic
          under discussion. On the other hand, it's best not to change
          the topic too often, especially when it's a hotly debated topic
          that is only peripherally (if at all) involved with singledom
          and it is likely that many people will be killing the topic
          (see the section on killfiles later in this file) in an attempt
          to avoid reading about it. Sometimes, when you do change the
          subject header, you may wish to list what the previous topic
          was as well; for example, if the topic being discussed under
          "Spiders vs. Lemon Pate'" had strayed to an in-depth
          examination of the sexual habits of people with mohawks, you
          might want to change the subject to "Mohawk Sex (was: Spiders
          vs. Lemon Pate')" which would allow those who are following the
          discussion under one heading to continue to follow it under the
          new heading.
          
          Even more important than occasionally changing the subject to
          match the actual topic being discussed is eliminating
          inappropriate groups when replying to a cross-posted article;
          no matter what newsgroup you might be reading when you decide
          to respond to an article, if you see more than one group listed
          in the "Newsgroups:" line of the header, your article is going
          to appear in all of them, so make sure that you delete any
          inappropriate groups from the list before sending your article.
          There are enough people out there who crosspost to a lot of
          groups maliciously, just to see how many people they can
          irritate with a few keystrokes, that a lot of readers don't
          have much patience left when it comes to articles
          inappropriately crossposted to the newsgroups they read, so you
          can make a lot of people pissed off at you by responding to a
          heavily crossposted article without taking the time to trim off
          the groups where your message doesn't really belong. Be warned,
          too, that there's enough of a problem with crossposting that
          many readers simply kill [don't read] articles that are
          crossposted to more than a few groups or, sometimes,
          crossposted at all, so a lot of people won't even see your
          article if you leave the extraneous groups in.
          
          If you simply must reply to a heavily crossposted article and
          have your article appear in all the groups the previous article
          was posted to, you also have the option of listing just the
          relevant groups in the "Followup-To:" line of the header; that
          way responses to your article will show up just in the
          newsgroups you list and you'll annoy fewer readers, since even
          if they think your article is inappropriate for the group
          they're reading, at least you'll look like you're making some
          effort to be considerate of other groups.
          
   What else can I do to improve my ASCII appearance? 

          Any article posted to soc.singles will be read by many, many
          thousands of people across the world who will be basing their
          impressions of you as a person entirely on the messages you
          post, so it's worthwhile to make sure your messages are clear
          and readable. Probably the single most common mistake is not
          putting in carriage returns when they are needed, either typing
          in an entire paragraph or message in a single line (which looks
          sloppy, is difficult to quote properly, and may be truncated by
          some offline readers) or only putting in a return after more
          than 80 columns (which looks even worse, since on most systems
          this will show up as alternating full lines and really short
          lines). Most of the time, it's best to limit your lines to no
          more than 72 columns, which leaves enough extra space that they
          will still be easily readable even when quoted a time or two.
          Even if your system can handle reformatting messages so they
          look nice anyway, remember that most systems don't do this and,
          if you aren't careful with inserting carriage returns, your
          messages will be harder to read by others.
          
          Other obvious elements like correct spelling, punctuation, and
          grammar help make your message more readable too (and will make
          you all the more likely to generate positive responses rather
          than grammar flames). Another thing to avoid is typing in your
          messages in all-caps (LIKE THIS) which makes it seem like
          you're shouting--plus it makes it less likely that you'll be
          taken seriously, since the percentage of words in all-caps in a
          message has been linked in several studies to the
          psychoceramicity (crackpottedness) of the author.
          
          If you're replying to someone else's article, it helps to quote
          at least some of what the other article says, just so people
          have a better idea of what you're talking about. Delete any
          unnecessary quoted material, but leave in the attributions (the
          list of who said what) of any text that you do leave in. If you
          want to refer to another article explicitly, it's best to
          mention the message-ID of the article in question--don't tell
          your readers the number of the article on your system, because
          article numbers will be different on every system.
          
   What do these weird combinations of punctuation marks I see frequently
   in people's messages mean? 

          These are called "smileys" since the most common ones used are
          little pictograms representing a smiling face: ":-)". Because
          the net is inherently a text medium, it lacks many of the
          nuances of ordinary face-to-face conversation like facial
          expressions and tone of voice, so people try to make up for
          them in various ways, the most popular being the "smiley."
          
          Standard smileys include:
          

      :-)  :)    smile              8-)  B-)    smile w/ glasses
      ;-)        wink               :->         ironic/lecherous smile
      :-(        sad/unhappy        :-O         surprise

          There's an ongoing debate as to whether smileys are a good
          thing or a bad thing; some people like to use them whenever
          possible, others feel that writing should stand on its own
          without having to point out whether something was supposed to
          be funny or not.
          
          You'll also note unrepentant programmer types adding variants
          of C compiler directives to their posts or use parodies of HTML
          tags to clue you in on the deep, inner feelings that lurk
          beneath the facade of their words. For example:
          
            #dripping_sarcasm_mode(ON)

          and
          

                                Good Eeevening

          In general, it should be pretty obvious even to the
          non-programmer what the writer means to convey with these
          directives.
          
   How do you pronounce "soc"? 

          There's no currently accepted standard. The currently most
          popular pronunciations are "soak," "sosh" (like in 'social'),
          "sock," and "soas" (as in "sociological"). The least popular
          pronunciations include "sach," "sick," and "throat-warbler
          mangrove." The IEEE and CCITT are jointly working on developing
          an international standard for the pronunciation of "soc" and
          expect that the first draft of the standard will be available
          some time near the end of the third quarter of 2011.
          
   What's a ".GIF", ".JPG" or ".MPG"? 

          GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format" and is a common
          format in which pictures are stored for display on a computer
          screen; when someone on soc.singles mentions something that
          someone else would really like to have seen, the latter person
          may jokingly ask for a "GIF"--but even if you're asked for one,
          don't even think of posting it to soc.singles, since they tend
          to be huge and are expressly forbidden on non-binaries groups.
          The same goes for .JPG or JPEG (another popular graphics
          format) and .MPG, MPEG, or .AVI (graphics formats for
          computer-displayed "movies.")
          
   Is there a World-Wide Web page for soc.singles? 

          Yes. Trygve Lode (soc.singles faq maintainer and lunatic)
          maintains a soc.singles homepage at
          
     http://www.trygve.com/singles.html
     
          which is slowly being expanded as people give me suggestions
          for what they'd like to see there.
          
          Ross ridge maintains a soc.singles page at
          
     http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/rridge/ss/soc-singles.html
     
          Additionally, homepages for the Dallas Poker Mini-Boink and the
          DenverBoink are available at
          
     http://www.swcp.com/~russo/DPMB.html
     http://www.swcp.com/~russo/denverboink/DB.html
     (courtesy of Thomas Russo; note that "DPMB" is in all-caps)
     
          If you're not familiar with the World-Wide Web, but would like
          to be, you may wish to check out the WWW FAQ on news.answers or
          ftp it from rtfm (/pub/usenet/news.answers/www/faq/part1 and
          part2).
          
   What, exactly, are "Disney Chemicals"? 

          "Disney Chemicals" refers to the hypothesized fizzy brain
          chemicals that can cause a person to believe in "happily ever
          afters," the impending appearance of the prince/princess of
          one's dreams on one's doorstep, and an eternity of true love
          and blissful togetherness.
          
   How do you pronounce "Trygve" 

          It's sorta like "TREEG-vah" except that the 'EE' is between a
          long e and a short i.
          
   How come nice guys don't get laid? 

          Nice guys do get laid; it's guys who whine a lot who generally
          don't.
          
   How come nice guys/gals/small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri get
   dumped for jerks/bimbos/hyperfungal Rigellian psuedoshoggoths? 

          Mostly for the same reasons jerks get dumped for nice guys,
          bimbos get dumped for other bimbos, and hyperfungal Rigellian
          pseudoshoggoths get rejected in favor of lesser Altairian
          shaggy-toothed carno-weeds. No matter how much more keenly you
          feel it when it happens to you than when it happens to someone
          else, the fact of the matter is that getting
          dumped/rejected/passed over in favor of others happens to
          pretty much everybody, no matter how nice or mean they happen
          to be. Remember, too, that your perception of someone you've
          just been dumped for is unlikely to match that of the person
          who just dumped you: most people tend to view their rivals
          through a jaundiced eye to begin with; your dumper's tastes,
          turn-ons, and values are rarely quite the same as yours; and
          it's likely that your rival will feel jealous of _you_, which
          tends to get in the way of your rival showing you his or her
          best side. It's also worth noting that the person who dumped
          you may be trying to make you feel better by emphasizing your
          rival's bad qualities and failing to mention the good ones,
          figuring that bubbling over about his or her wonderful new
          partner would only make you feel worse.
          
          No matter why you've been dumped or whom you've been dumped
          for, the best advice is generally the same: take it in stride
          and get on with your life. There's always tomorrow and very few
          people have ever found love and happiness by pining away and
          moping.
          
   I met someone last week at a party; what do you think this person's
   deepest and innermost feelings for me are? 

          That's one of the most common questions new people ask on
          soc.singles and, unfortunately, one of the most difficult ones
          to answer in any meaningful way. Trouble is, all people are
          different and what would mean something for one person is
          likely to mean something completely different for someone
          else--and if you have trouble figuring out someone you know and
          have first-hand experience with, imagine how difficult it can
          be for people who have never met this person and are dealing
          only with second-hand information to figure out what's on that
          person's mind. That doesn't mean you can't ask the other
          readers of soc.singles what they think, but it does mean that
          you shouldn't take any advice you get too seriously or think of
          it as a substitute for actually talking to the person you're
          curious about.
          
   Is it possible for men and women to be just friends? 

          Yes; many people have friends of the opposite sex without ever
          having any sort of sexual relationship with them. This, of
          course, doesn't imply anything one way or the other as to
          whether you or any other given individual can really be "just
          friends" with a member of the opposite sex.
          
   Do conversations on the net ever blossom into torrid romances? 

          Yes; it's actually not even particularly unusual. Conversations
          over the net have the advantage of being a non-threatening way
          to get to know someone and, sometimes, if a person has managed
          to interest you through articles and/or e-mail and this person
          continues to interest you when you meet for real, well, all
          sorts of interesting things have been known to happen. However,
          this doesn't mean that simply by posting (even if you post an
          awful lot) you'll meet your dream mate; indeed, if it's obvious
          that you're posting for this reason, you'll tend to turn off
          most of the people who might otherwise be interested. So,
          basically, if you're open to finding a mate this way, the best
          thing to do is just to hang out and have a good time and if it
          happens, it happens--and if it doesn't, you'll at least have
          had a good time. (Strangely enough, there are even some folks
          who recommend this approach to mate-finding for real life as
          well.)
          
   What about personal ads? 

          Don't post them on soc.singles.
          
   Will this message ever end? 

          Well, it always has before.
          
   How about posting articles asking for readers to send postcards to a
   kid in England who is dying of cancer and wants to set the
   world record for most cards received before he dies? 

          No, don't do it. He's been cured, has asked many times for
          people to stop sending him cards, and thoroughly regrets ever
          having had the idea in the first place. The "Neiman Marcus $250
          Cookie Recipe" story and the "Good Times Virus" are also
          well-known urban legends; if you want to read about them or,
          for some reason, write about them, the newsgroup
          alt.folklore.urban is devoted just to that subject. Two other
          good places to dig up the details on these and other urban
          legends are the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Urban
          Legend Reference Pages ( http://www.snopes.com ) and the
          alt.folklore.urban archives ( http://www.urbanlegends.com ) .
          
   How come there are so many kooks on the net? 

          In a word, attention. It's an unfortunate fact of life that a
          turd in an art gallery gets a lot more attention than yet
          another Picasso. Getting people across the world to tell you
          that you're a disgusting twit seems like a strange thing to get
          turned on by, but obviously enough people out there derive
          sufficient enjoyment and satisfaction from it to keep the net
          well-stocked with fertilizer. Most net.kooks quickly find a few
          stock tactics that are sure to annoy enough people into
          responding that they can just sit back and repost the same
          stuff year after year and bask in all the attention it gets
          them with practically no effort on their part. Arguing with a
          net kook only provides further encouragement--if you want to
          keep all the Picassos from being replaced by wall-to-wall
          turds, the only effective approach is to ignore them until they
          go off in search of other people still naive enough to play the
          Pay-Attention-To-Meeee game.
          
   OK, we're getting near the end of the file now--what's this about
   "killfiles" that you promised to tell us about? 

          Most newsreaders have a provision for "killing" messages; that
          is, marking them as read before you get to them, so your
          newsreader then skips over them automatically instead of
          showing them to you. I'm going to discuss how to do this in rn
          and its derivatives (trn, etc.) but most other newsreaders
          should have similar capabilities (though the command syntax
          won't necessarily be identical). Topics are the easiest things
          to kill, as you need only type the 'k' key and all subsequent
          messages with that topic will be marked as read; you can also
          kill things in more complex ways by typing in a "regular
          expression" followed by ":j", telling the newsreader to "junk"
          (mark as read) all the articles that match that regular
          expression. Remember, you still can read the messages that have
          been marked as read if you want to, either by typing in the
          message number or by using the 'N' and 'P' commands to move to
          the next and previous messages rather than the 'n' and 'p'
          commands.
          
          A regular expression normally consists of a pair of '/'s with a
          pattern you'd like to match in the middle. For example, if you
          wanted to kill all messages whose topics included the word
          "banana" you could type in "/banana/:j" and hit a return (and
          it would list the numbers of the articles that were being
          junked--the topics "BananaSizeWar" and "vegemite and banana
          delight; mmmm-mmm" would be junked. The default is to check
          just the topic line and not differentiate between upper- and
          lower-case letters; that is, it wouldn't matter whether the
          topic had the word "banana" or "bAnAnA" in it. If you want it
          to be case sensitive and select "bAnAnA" but not "Banana", a
          'c' should be placed after the trailing slash: "/bAnAnA/c:j".
          You can also have your newsreader check more than just the
          topic line--adding an 'h' after the trailing slash makes the
          newsreader check the entire header (allowing you to kill
          messages by a given author and/or from a particular site) and
          adding an 'a' will check the whole article; thus,
          "/grunting/a:j" would mark every article containing the word
          "grunting" as read. (And, of course, this may be combined with
          the 'c' option so that "/Grunting/ca:j" would kill off only
          those articles in which "Grunting" is capitalized.)
          
          You can also type in an expression like this without the ":j"
          at the end, in which case it will simply locate and display the
          article that matches the pattern. Using question marks ("?")
          instead of slashes will make it search backwards instead of
          forwards and the "r" option makes it scan articles that you've
          already read. Thus, if you were trying to find the article in
          which somebody mentioned something about the use of badger dung
          as an aphrodesiac, you could type in "?badger dung?ar" for it
          to search all preceding articles for a mention of badger dung;
          if you want it to mark all the articles that mention badger
          dung as unread, you can type in "?badger dung?ar:m"
          
          Kill commands like those above may be placed in a file where
          they will be performed automatically when you read a group.
          This file goes in a directory off your News directory
          corresponding to the group name and the default name for this
          file is KILL (note capitals). Thus, the killfile for
          soc.singles would be
          
     [your home directory]/News/soc/singles/KILL
     
          Hitting a 'K' will not only kill the topic you're reading, but
          also add a command to kill that topic in future sessions to
          your killfile for that group, creating it if it doesn't exist,
          even creating the directories to put it in if necessary. While
          this is the easiest way to add to a killfile, it is also
          generally the least useful, since most topics do die or change
          after a while, but unless you edit that line out of your
          killfile, it will continue to live in there, eating up
          processor time and generally slowing everything down whenever
          you read that group. In general, keeping your killfiles to a
          minimum is a good approach, especially if you are sharing a
          computer with other users who don't like the system bogging
          down any more than you do.
          
    A few examples:
    
        killing messages from beavis@butthead.edu:
                /^From: *beavis@butthead\.edu/h:j
                
        killing messages cross-posted from alt.boring.prattle:
                /^Newsgroups:.*alt\.boring\.prattle/h:j
                
        killing messages crossposted to three or more groups:
                /^Newsgroups:.*,.*,/h:j
                
        killing all messages that even mention hairballs:
                /hairballs/a:j
                
          You'll notice that I used a few strange characters up there:
          these are characters that have special meaning when used in an
          expression like one of these: '^' indicates the beginning of a
          line so that the first example will only consider lines that
          begin with "from:"; '.' is a single-character wildcard that
          will match any character (that's why when we really want a '.',
          we have to precede it with a '\' as we've done in the above
          examples); and '*' means that the pattern should match an
          arbitrary number of characters matching the character
          immediately before it in the expression (in the first example,
          you can see that we use it to allow there to be an arbitrary
          number of spaces between "From:" and "beavis" and in the second
          example, we've used it after the '.' wildcard so that there can
          be an arbitrary number of characters of any kind between
          "Newsgroups:" and "alt"). More about regular expressions and
          killfiles can be found by typing "man rn" and "man ed" at your
          Unix prompt.
          
   Is there any copyright on this FAQ?

          Yep; the entire contents of this FAQ is written and maintained
          by Trygve Lode (tlode@nyx.net) and is (c) Copyright 2000. Feel
          free to copy, transmit, and distribute this FAQ in unmodified
          form for any not-for-profit use in any medium you desire
          (electronic, print, interpretive dance, etc.). If you wish to
          include all or part of the FAQ in any for-profit publication or

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