Once upon a time there was a wonderful place on the net where everybody knew your name and you all got together regularly and it wasn't the bar known as Cheers!
This was the newsgroup called soc.singles, the child of one of the original usenet newsgroups net.singles. Apparently, this group has been around for over 25 years in some form.
But as the net grew into a commercial enterprise, the group became full of spam, and rude people who thought it was the place to post personal ads who then had public temper tantrums when it was pointed out to them that alt.personals was down the hall a little way. [The FAQ for soc.singles can be found at Trygve's Tree House.] So the people who formed what some thought of as the "ruling clique" of soc.singles held a vote to create a grandchild of net.singles called soc.singles.moderated.
SSM, as it has come to be known, is moderated by a bot, a robot program. When you send your first post to the group, a message is sent back to you detailing the "Laws of the Land" and telling you the secret word needed to get your first message through. After that, you're on a list and all your posts make their way to this little corner of Usenet.
Thanks to the people I've met through soc.singles and soc.singles.moderated I've travelled to about a dozen places in the United States in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia and New York. You can meet some of them too:
Back to main page.