Fascinating, Mike, a scenario that never occurred to me for a moment. No, I
don't suppose it would be a high paid job attracting talent, therefore the
'team' probably consists largely if not entirely of bored individuals who
apply their own prejudices the same way the average person fails to grasp
the fundamentals of impartiality, and so it would indeed be a rapid
turnover.

To make a wild guess - that I'd expect to be wrong, but would like to
believe for the sake of neatness - MS farmed it out about the same time they
reinstated the MVP program? Though I'm not sure 'reinstated' is really
appropriate, so much as 'hijacked by the PR dept'.

I wouldn't expect an answer to this, but I'd be equally fascinated to know
if MS paid for the flights to the MVP get-togethers in the States. Because
if all an individual sees, beyond the invite, is free MS software, the
reward looks about as ethical as the way they got the near-monopoly on the
desktop (which was ironic as my current position is that only MS make a
desktop product worth bothering with and that every version of Windows from
32 bit onward is better than every version of any other desktop operating
system currently in production).

Shane


Mike M wrote:
FYI The "team", if one is prepared to grace them with such a name,
responsible for maintaining the NGs are external contractors and have
been now for some years. Basically they haven't a clue and the gut
feeling is that team members last just a few weeks before leaving. The
result is that no-one seems to know how the filters work or why
many even exist. Few at Microsoft know anything about NNTP and even
less seem to care. There are however a dedicated few Microsoft
employees who go to extraordinary lengths to try and keep spam and
the like to a minimum but I suspect that even they must be close to
despair as it appears that their requests to the "team" are often
ignored.
Well, it does happen automatically, has done for years. And to put
serial offenders in would be easy. But then MS has many times
demonstrated questionable priorities. Cases in point the Privacy
settings in IE, Root Certificates etc. You might say it's very
American, where Business is Inherently 'Good' and if it is not
already legislated against and is obviously intended to profit, it is
allowed to continue despite other things being mercilessly crushed
though one might consider the potential 'harm' of each to be
essentially equivalent. Of course, we do this too, just more
imitatively - although I suspect Jacqui Smith is imitating Mary
Whitehouse rather than the US.
(Just been reading about the California violent video games bill
being overturned by the Federal Court!)

But, really, I've made numerous posts over the years to test it and
include certain words and you'll never see them - or at best you'll
be able to see them flicker into and out of existence like a virtual
particle.