QUOTE(Sarcasticidealist @ Thu 28th May 2009, 7:41pm)
(I'm not clear on how Usenet worked, so I don't know how he got suffrage on the question in the first place. But there doesn't seem to be any reason at all to implicate any David Boothroyd of whom we're aware with zoophilia.)
There never was any sort of suffrage for voting on newsgroup creation. The basic idea is that someone who wants to create a newsgroup in the main hierarchy (that means anything but alt.* (and does not include country hierarchies which all had their own rules and procedures)) only needs to post a request to the proper newsgroup, and people who subscribe to that newsgroup voted.
Most subscribers to those maintenance newsgroups were either news admins or sysadmins; or just plain were interested in the otherwise inane and boring chatter between UUCP (or, later, nntp) sites. I wouldn't ascribe any sort of sexual interest to anyone who voted in one direction or the other -- I very much doubt half of news admins had interest in bestiality -- because the voting criterion usually had more do to about a newsgroup being "on topic", on in the "right" part of the hierarchy than any sort of judgment on the proposed topic itself (though that sometimes factored in).
As to the David Boothroyd that voted there, I have no idea if it's also the current Arb. I never had any contact with any of the people on that list (one direction of vote or another) except when they happened to be nearby news admins. I would tend to doubt it very much though; it's the wrong continent, the wrong field of study, and I'm pretty sure the David that was an arb is also too young for the timeline to fit.
Incidentally, "Marc-Andre" is a fairly common first name, and "Pelletier" is, last I checked, the second most common last name in Quebec (second only to Tremblay) -- I'd be careful to ascribe things you find to a random "Marc-Andre Pelletier" to me. In fact, I even know of one that's a dentist that flies small prop planes that was born on the same day I was (which, lemme tell you, makes getting insurance a pain).
In that particular case, I
was that Marc-Andre. I think my stance of freedom of expression is well known. And, again, that still brings the same question forward (which nobody has answered with anything else than victorian outrage that I might be *shudder* involved in the pr0n "millieu"): what the hell does that have to do with my capacity to be an Arbitrator?
-- Coren