Strategies for Dealing with Usenet Bullies

The very first thing you should do
Nothing.

At all.

The second thing you should do
Refuse to respond.

Well, what SHOULD I do?
Ignore the bullies. They want attention. They want to control you and your group. As they say, they want to "own" you.

But my group is unusable! What do I do?
Set some filters. Ignore them and their trash. You have some choices. Unsubscribe. Just abandon your group to the bullies. It is what a lot of people do. They don't want or need the grief. It will grow quiet when only bullies post. Or at least no one will care. What other options? Use your group exactly as you would if the bullies had never posted there. Let me use a military analogy. What do you do if your net's frequency is being jammed by the enemy? Work through the interference. Pass your message, don't acknowledge that you are being jammed? What? Why? The enemy has no idea how effective his jamming may be. The only way to gauge jamming  effectiveness is to listen to the net and see if communications are disrupted. If the net behaves normally - no one is complaining about the jamming, people acknowledge one another's transmissions without asking for things to be repeated over and over, etc. - then the enemy must assume their jamming is ineffective, so they will try a more lucrative target and leave you alone. While it is unlikely the bullies will just stop posting, you will be denying them what they want, and you will be doing what you want. In time, your group will have much less bully crap in it, because they need to control, and you will be showing no signs of being controlled. That makes your group no fun.

OK, makes sense, but what about the people who ALWAYS respond?
THAT is a problem. Don't respond to the bullies. DO respond to the first responders. In RL first responders are good guys, but not on Usenet. Help those who respond to the bullies to chill. Point them here. Suggest that they join FIA. Ultimately, if they just cannot stop responding to the bullies, you are just going to have to killfile them, just as you killfile the bullies. What choice do you have? But try to work with them, at least for a while, and try to get them to understand how useless (and destructive) their behavior is.