Again, the only proper way is to complain to the offender's ISP and/or news service provider. Use the same procedure as for Spam complaints. Do *not* reply or comment by posting articles to the newsgroup.
- I want to complain about a virus.
This is the one case where you not only ought to, but *must* notify the newsgroup. Post a short message in which you clearly identify who posted it and in which article. Apart from this, proceed as in the Spam and flood cases.
I saw some ugly hardcore / fashion softy pictures. How do I stop that guy from posting such crap?
You can't. If everybody could stop everybody else, the NG would be dead in no time, because for every picture there's always *someone* out there who dislikes it. Instead, use your kill filter to hide what you dislike. Most regular posters only post pictures within a relatively narrow range of types, and you will quickly come to learn whose taste coincides with your own.
How do I get most out of the kill filter feature?
Kill filters come with (at least) two options that must be kept distinct: "mark read" and "skip". Further, you can filter by subject, author, number of lines and possibly other parameters too. A sensible way to start may be: - subject filters --> mark read - author filters --> skip - number of lines filters --> skip Why? The reason is simple: A subject filter is far less specific than an author filter. If you skip a subject *all* postings containing that word in their headline will be deleted before you can take a look at them. A stupid example: "Spam" is a very likely word to be filtered. But a posting containing "no Spam" will also disappear. This multiplies if you use wildcards; "Spam" would also filter a series like "spamela". So be careful. There are words that usually appear only in commercial Spam postings: sex, gay, wet, cash, blow, lick, money, daddy, teen, hot, fuck, $$$, cum, free, woman, horny, XXX. If you skip filter an author, you might consider removing the filter after a few weeks. Maybe he has mended his ways by then. As for number of lines filters, they should only be used if you're not interested at all in discussions but want only the pictures. Anything less than, say, 100 lines is almost certainly not a picture and may be filtered away.
Why is there such a big difference in picture quality between different pictures? Sometimes even the same picture may occur in different versions with different quality.
This may be due to several reasons. First, the picture may have been scanned more than once, with different scanners at different resolutions, and maybe from different originals in various states of preservation. This probably accounts for most cases where the same picture occurs in more than one version. Second, the person who made the original scan, or anyone else who has downloaded the picture, may have processed it in an image manipulation program. The majority of pictures are in the JPEG format. JPEG is a compression algorithm designed to make picture files smaller so that they may be transmitted faster. The trouble is, JPEG compression is "lossy", i.e. all of the information in the original picture is not preserved. Higher compression rates mean smaller files and more loss of quality.
REMEMBER:
If you work with image editing, do not save intermediary results on JPEG format. The quality degradation is cumulative, so *every* open/save cycle will make the picture worse.
