Look, it was created as a joke, okay? Someone happened to make a posting in one of the man.cs newsgroups about the fact that people were spending far too much time reading newsgroups and not doing labs. So I decided to create a newsgroup for that very purpose.

Some of the less well-humoured newsadmins from around the globe decided that this was less than amusing and proceeded to send a whole load of complaining emails to me. There's even a few rmgroup cmsgs around there. But a procmail filter has sorted the email out, and most newsfeeds still seem to be carrying it (Deja in particular seem to carry most of the postings).

The basis of the newsgroup is to provide a place for people to chat, play games of mornington cres(c?)ent, blather aimlessly, flirt, get net.married and generally get up to allsorts of silly stuff instead of doing labs (where labs in this case refers to any kind of student-esque work which takes place in a lab where there is free access to computers).

The newsgroup actually sprang into life over a weekend without my actually noticing. I never expected people to, like, use it. I think the Assassins guild had something to do with it.

Julian Yon is the self appointed maintainer of the faq. I have no problem with this as I get to see him every day and am utterly free to hurt/maim/hideously injure him if he puts anything in it I don't like :)