OCT 23, 2000 - nfilter is bound to be a handy download to install on your PC, if you spend much time in astrological newsgroups. If you're not famililar with them, perhaps it would help to suggest that newsgroups are somewhere in the netherland of the online world, maybe halfway between email and the World Wide Web. They're online bulletin boards, where people post public queries and responses to various topics. And there are more than a few astrological newsgroups online. (For a list of the main ones, see the newsgroup section of Tees Reitsma's Cosmic Connections.) Astrology newsgroups can be handy ways to learn about the cosmic craft, if you can get past the poor signal to noise ratio. Most newsgroups are unmoderated, which means any psycho can post a message, go ballistic on another poster, etc. Moderated newsgroups mostly keep a lid on such insanity, but this is accomplished through the indignity of censorship. Rather than such an affront, why not fend for yourself? That's what nfilter is all about. It's a 32-bit newsgroup filtering program that works automatically with your existing news reader to prevent objectionable newsgroup messages from showing up on your computer screen in the first place - and you decide what (or whom) is objectionable. Even if your news reader has filtering capabilities, chances are that nfilter can do the job better: it's fairly sophisticated and flexible, and it's free for the downloading for Windows 95/98/NT (and successors, presumably).
