commercial advertisements on the mycology discussion group

[George Riner]

I would like to know if I'm one of the offenders.  I think my
activities in this group have been either a)chiming in on
identification questions/suggestions or the NAMA/NEMF conference.
Looking back over the recent (back to May 1, 1996), I'm not sure I see
a lot of 'commercial advertisements'.  Maybe it's the person in
Balt/DC area who wanted to buy morels; Bob Rust was looking for
mushroom users groups and got a couple of possibly commercial
responses; Ivo Polach wants to buy mushroom books; Louis Bonham's
request for digesters of pine needles elicited a reference to Fungi
Perfecti; Ralph Arnold posted a solicitation for FUNGUS and a web site
to check out for growing mushrooms commercially (this message comes
across pretty close to 'commercial advertisement'); Dr. Krishna
offered to publish SEM pictures (possibly commercial).

Ralph Arnold and Dr. Krishna seem to come the closest to 'commercial
advertising' that I see.  Out of 130 postings since May 1, that's less
than 2%.  Doesn't seem a statistically significant increase in
commercial adverstisements. Yet!

:George



On 28 May 1996 15:24:00 -0700, jmurphy at TFM.FMNH.ORG (Jack Murphy)
wrote:

>Dear fellow mycologists;
>        It seems that there has been an increase in the number of commercial
>advertisements that have found their way into our group lately.  I may be
>overreacting, but I'm bombarded enough with advertisements and would like to
>do what I can to discourage this practice.  My first inclination is to send
>numerous long messages back to these advertisers, as a way to fill up their
>RAM or hard drive or modem or whatever and waste as much of their time as
>they have ours.  Is this a bad idea?  Does anyone more internet-literate
>than I have any suggestions how we as a community can discourage this behavior?
>
>sincerely,
>
>Jack
>
>******************************************
>Dr. John (Jack) Murphy  (JMURPHY at fmppr.fmnh.org)
>Dept. of Botany
>Field Museum of Natural History
>Chicago, IL 60605-2496
>(312) 922-9410 ext. 722
>fax (312) 427-2530
>