I think Internet Historian's Zumabot link tells a good tale. Here's an excerpt:

Three years ago, Usenet's culture and history discussions suffered under a flood of huge swaths of repetitive propaganda concerning the supposed Armenian murders of Turks in 1918 (history shows that the killing was the other way around), coming from a poster named Serdar Argic at a site known as zuma.UUCP.

Serdar responded to, seemingly, every and any Usenet post he could find that mentioned Turkey or Armenia, even in newsgroups that had nothing to do with either country. The poster was generally harangued with such phrases as "your criminal Armenian grandparents" (even if the poster happened to be, say, Japanese) and with over-the-top subject headings such as "The Self-Admitted Crook and Liar", "The Criminal SDPA-ASALA Grandparents of The Gum Brain", or "A mouthpiece for the fascist x-Soviet Armenian Government". This was usually followed by a lengthy essay concerning the alleged Armenian mass murders.

Some participants tried to argue with Argic, but that only made matters worse as he replied to each post with more harangues, along with successively more hysterical accusations concerning secret Armenian conspiracies. Some watched in amusement, and some even wrote parodies mocking the overwrought style of the posts. But the amusement quickly turned to annoyance when it became apparent that the sheer volume of Serdar Argic posts was overwhelming the discussions on the hardest-hit newsgroups.

It quickly became apparent, however, that his responses didn't have much intelligence behind them. For one thing, they followed a distinct repeating pattern. For another, Argic did not appear to distinguish between the nation and the bird: posts containing references to Thanksgiving turkey were as likely to become targets as posts discussing Turkey's foreign policy.

Over time, a consensus built: Serdar Argic was not a person, but a computer program which scanned the news articles and responded to any article that contained certain words, plugging in the name of the article's writer ("John Sugaharo's criminal Armenian grandparents") and other random phrases. Because of the robotic nature of the responses, this program was promptly dubbed "the zumabot".

The problem was that Zumabot, just like some of the posters here, flooded Usenet groups with words, so much so that others could not carry on a discussion. Was it a restriction of freedom to attempt to control the amount that Zumabot posted, or were others restricted in their freedom of expression because of the volume of repetitious stuff posted by Zumabot?

I see that the Gaza Strip thread is flooded with 814 messages, much of it copy-paste propaganda and rantings from anonymous posters using multiple names. I can't imagine that it's possible for anyone to post a sensible opinion in that thread or the many others like it. I tried to say something when the thread was about 500 messages long, and I was condemned because somebody contended that I hadn't read the entire thread (which I hadn't).

Somehow, that seems unfair, like our freedom to discuss has been overwhelmed by those who feel a compulsion to post words in ridiculous quantities.

What can we do to take back our forum, so we can once again enjoy the humor and comraderie and richness of a decent, intelligent discussion?

-Joe Offer-