[fallinghawks]

> most groups had more than a modicum of civility

Fun and informative, yes; civil, largely -- until a vicious and relentless troll and about 4 or 5 of his sockpuppets entered my alt group and littered it with racist, filthy posts. This was around the mid 90s. I never felt so helpless -- I was just an end user. Even if I had control over my own server I would not have been able to kill these posts on other USENET servers. There was a woman, fortunately, who was part of a volunteer group of spam killers who had a magic capability to send a kill post instruction to all servers. She kept half an eye on my group, but it was only half an eye... still, better than nothing.