Hi, I've been lurking here a while(::is sorry about being an AOL user::). I've been to the AOL South Park message boards, but they all suck. I came here after a friend of mine sent me a link, and I liked it. So after a few days of lurking in the under shadows of this news group, I got tired of not posting so I came here a wrote this post. I have a few questions: Can someone send me the FAQ? What's a Troll? Are you allowed to curse here? Why do some of you hate AOL users? Do you eat Fluffy Cheese Monkeys?
In response to your questions: The FAQ is at this address: http://www.geocities.com/athens/olympus/1835/index.html. A troll is a person who posts messages on an NG for the purpose of pissing off the usual readers. DO NOT respond to them in any way. Yes, you can swear here. (Just not *too* much.) We don't hate all AOL members, just the morons. This goes for WebTV, too. Several regular posters are AOL members, and I used to be one. We don't eat Fluffy Cheese Monkeys, we eat Cheesy Poofs. :)
Basically, don't be an idiot or an asshole, and you'll be fine. Welcome to our newsgroup.
Welcome to the newsgroup. I'm Ashley, or Lady Jaqueline, or hey you! Nice to have you here.
Ashley "And I know it's not my place to judge Who you are or what you're gonna be I guess sometimes I forget Just how much you mean to me"- Guess the artist, get a point :)
You asked that question already a few weeks ago and you got a reply on the newsgroup. When you post here, you can't always expect to receive private attention, although occasionally some people will do that. (I am sending this both as private mail *and* as a public post.) Generally, if you post a question here, you need to check *back* here to see if anyone answered it.
Nobody will send you the FAQ. You have to *go* to it, on the web. Also, there is more than one South Park FAQ, including one that is just now being compiled but isn't quite ready. Here is the address of one of the completed FAQs. It's old, but it's there:
http://www.adequate.com/SouthPark/
You can find others very easily, but you'll have to learn how to use a web search engine first. And you'll have to learn that somewhere *other* than the South Park newsgroup. I'll say a little more about the "learning" thing below.
A post whose purpose is only to draw offended responses, rather than to make any actual commentary. (Often we say that the *person* who makes such a post is the troll, but in official Internet-ese, a troll is the post, not the poster.)
Yes. This is not an AOL chat room, where speech is monitored and freedom of speech is a bad joke. Watch this: damn. hell. fuck. shit. bitch. bastard. Nixon. Microsoft. See?
The main reason AOL users aren't well-liked (as a group) is because many of them post things like what you've just posted, for example, asking to be sent things (or, more commonly, *demanding* to be sent things). Many AOL users think the Internet is a bunch of little order desks, as if there are people sitting in each group who are paid to run it and help you figure it out. It's not like that. There is no owner or manager or help desk or order-fulfillment department.
And while a lot of people using providers *other* than AOL also do that kind of thing, AOL is the very worst at *encouraging* it, because they don't bother to point any of their new users to the groups where you could *learn* all these answers. Instead, their ads basically say, simplemindedly and stupidly, that you should just get nekkid and dive right into the pool, even if you can't swim, and it'll be someone else's problem if you drown there or shit yourself. The result is *millions* of users who don't know anything about the Internet, trying to use it, AND millions of users posting in the topical newsgroups trying to get help.
The topical newsgroups are for discussing their specific topics, not for helping millions of newcomers learn how to use their systems. Many AOL users don't figure that out for a long time, and that is why -- again, as a *group* -- they're often despised. And their sheer numbers magnify the problem to monstrous proportions.
(A good newsgroup to use to find answers to the kinds of questions you have asked is news.newusers.questions. There was a time when all new users were *automatically* subscribed to that group, and at that time there wasn't nearly the kind of animosity that we now see -- an animosity that has its root in the creation of a huge population of users too self-absorbed to know when they're behaving like idiots.)
And of course this problem is multiplied because AOL saturates the world with its advertising, and most of it is aimed at the level of people who can barely tie their own shoes. So AOL tends to draw a higher-than-average percentage of its users from dumber populations, and thus the idea that all AOL users are morons has become a common stereotype. And like any stereotype, there's some truth in it. The same kind of thing is happening with WebTV.
(There are other reasons AOL users have such a bad reputation, such as the fact that very few of them bother to learn how to *quote* from the original message, so their posts just begin out of the blue and nobody knows what they're replying to. But these are secondary things. They are not the main reason for the stereotype.)
(You may think that, because I answered you, that it was OK to post your questions anyway. It wasn't. I answered because I had some free time and because you didn't come off like the more typical AOL user, whose requests usually don't deserve helpful replies and usually don't get them. If you'd been presumptuous or hostile or balls-out rude, you probably would have gotten only nasty replies or people would have ignored you; either way you wouldn't have gotten the help you need. It's nice when anarchy works both ways....)
Well for the love of the Fluffy Cheese Monkey's sugar coated crap, I'm sorry. I also visit RASSM(rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc), and I thought I asked for the FAQ THERE. ::beats self with stick at mistake::