Welcome to Switchposters United for Justice

Howdy, pardner! You may have seen a link to SPUFJ in a .sig on Usenet or a mailing list. You may be wondering what a switchposter is, and why they have to unite to get justice.

My name is, among other things (but we’ll get to that) Amelia Bjornsdottir, and I am an infrequent Usenet poster. Mostly just shooting the shit with the occasional trolls like VanguardLH and Adam Kerman I come across, and posting about my drought anxieties.

Most literally, a switchposter is someone who may alternate between top, bottom, and through-quoting.

The SPUFJ statement of belief is as follows:

• We are switchposters. This doesn’t necessarily mean we alternate between top, bottom and through-posting when quoting in followups, but we will never berate anyone for doing so.
• It’s not the 80s anymore. Articles don’t cost the network $50. Most connections are via the Internet, which is essentially flat-rated. We do still conserve bandwidth where we can, but we do not publically berate people for long quotes, and ideally if we call it out at all, we do so in private, by email (or equivalent).
• We care more about substance than style. We don’t care if you format your message correctly. If you start calling for genocide, or you tell people you hope they get raped, or you baselessly accuse people who have never met of being the same person, we hope admins do something about you, and until then, we will co-ordinate to list your vital statistics here in Pan format so that people can block you.
• We believe that being unable to decode messages that are in Internet standard MIME formats is a receiver’s user agent problem, not a sender’s user agent problem. BinHex and UU are passé (but we won’t berate you for using it). It’s bad etiquette to use attachments, but if you have to, your message should be openable in an e-mail client.

Usenet trolls: be on notice.

Everyone else: consider becoming a switchposter.