Filtering

What are the types of filters and their uses?
To filter with the Agent newsreader, you have two basic choices:

Depending on your newsreader, you may have more options.

You can set filters to watch or to kill. Set a watch filter if you WANT to see something. Set a kill filter if you do not. With bullies, we use kill filters. How dead do you want them? You can ignore their posts my marking them as already having been read. You can delete their posts so that you won't even be tempted to peek, and you will cut the total volume of traffic in your group. Or you can have the filter ignore any thread that a certain nym posts to or that has certain words in the subject. All are excellent options, depending on what you are trying to achieve. Try them, you'll like them.

Bullies want to scream in your face. They don't want you to drown them out or shut the door or window. They will just go to another window and start shouting again. Bullies, by definition, want to control you, to "own" you. So they nymshift. A nym on Usenet is a personal thing, a "handle", a nickname that you stick with and use consistently so that people can associate the nym with an individual with a personality and a style that others will choose to associate or ignore. Bullies don't care about their nyms. They don't want you to know who they are. They don't want you to be able to filter on nym.

Subject filters have shortcomings too

Subject filters work marginally better. Bullies live to attack. They often want the object of their attack in the subject line to attract fellow bullies. You will find that filtering on certain words in the subject line will work better than a nym filter. Filtering on "pedo" or some other pejorative term is helpful. Certain nyms are often used in subject lines when attacks are in progress. If you filter on the nym in the subject, you will not filter than nym's posts, just the posts of the person using that nym in a subject line.

Kill the whole thread for better volume control

Ignoring entire threads, rather than just individual posts, filters out more junk. It also filters out people who can't resist responding to the trolls and bullies. That's OK. They should expect to be filtered. Responding to trolls and bullies does not contribute to topic discussion in the group.