LOL (laughing out loud). You gotta love it. I do believe that I have seen it all. Since I am subscribed to several rootsweb mail lists, and receive AT LEAST 150 messages a day, some more than once as they are cross-posted to multiple lists, I am amazed by the number of people who subscribe to these lists and then complain that they are receiving too many messages and that their in-box is overflowing and therefore suggest that no one post any messages in which the complainer is not interested. On one surname list a person complained that he got 40 messages per day total including personal e-mail and he wanted the list split into North and South because "It drives me bug nuts reading all those e-mails from folks hunting for XXXXXXX ancestors who rolled off the boat in 1920 or so and landed somewhere in the Northeast. I have complained about this before, and the response has been that some of the XXXXXXXX saw the light and moved South. My answer is ok, then subscribe to both. My family landed in Virginia at some point in the 1600's and never went North. And, I think that covers most of the XXXXXXX Southern families. If I have to read one more time about Uncle Versie or some such XXXXXXXX who lived in Cleveland, Ohio in 1948, but they don't know where he came from, I will holler. I don't have too many problems with the North other than April, 1865." I deleted the surname from the complaint and inserted XXXXXXXX. Well, what about the people with that surname that are searching in Canada, or Europe, or Australia, etc. which list would they use? I have seen these types of complaints ruin the sharing of information on the lists. On another county list, a kind soul was copying and pasting daily obits from an online newspaper. This listing was generating 2 messages as the list would not accept the posting as 1 message. Because of the complaints of a few, the obits are not being posted anymore. The subject of these messages was clearly marked and anyone not interested could delete them easily. The irony is that the discussion of posting the obits generated more than 2 messages for a number of days. Another problem seems to arise from the recent changes in the Message Boards postings. These messages are being cross-posted to the mail lists. Used to be that those messages were clearly marked as such with instruction that replies be posted to the Message Board. That is not the case any more and unless you read all the garbage in the header (which I can turn off), there is NO indication that a message originated on the connected Message Board. On another county mail list, a member posts tons of old obits to a Message Board and these then show up on the mail list. Then, of course, every now and again, someone shows up and complains about the number of obit postings. Then there are those who ask for suggestions and when suggestions are made, get insulted because they have been doing genealogy for a number of years and KNOW how to do research. On a census look-up list, I have seen people request look-ups that would require hours of research because they don't have enough information and then complain, "Don't make us wait forever for the answer to our request." I've seen people request look-ups in death records (not SSDI) for a person who left his family in 1928 and was never seen or heard from since and don't know where they may have gone. The topic of genealogy is very wide, although there are definitely some subjects that are truly NOT genealogy and are better served in another forum or through another means, such as those posts asking for information about specific living individuals from whom they have been separated at some time in the past. It all gets rather stupid and silly after a while. Unlike ignorance, there is no cure for stupidity. You can educate ignorance, stupidity refuses to be educated. Eileen Irwin Mesa, AZ ---------------------------------------------------- NetZero Platinum Sign Up Today - Only $9.95 per month! http://my.netzero.net/s/signup?r=platinum&refcd=PT97