Day 5 Observations

This is my last day of observations for the Rumor mill news group. The group has a total of 1,296 members and was created on December 28, 2002. The group is under the category of conspiracy theory. After observing for the last five days, I have concluded that this group strays away from this categorization and mainly provides different angles on current events. The few rules to this group are email attachments are not acceptable, members cannot hide their email address and messages require approval from the moderator of the group. The yahoo group site has a history of messages per month since the group was created. This group seemed to be the most active in 2003, after it was first created. The Rumor Mill News contains its own web page separate from the yahoo group page. I visited this site and discovered that it is cluttered with advertisements up and down each side of the page. The site has its own reading room and other than that seems quite useless. In the past 5 days I have noticed there has been few accounts of common problems usually found in a CMC community. I have only seen one account of possible trolling and free riding. Gender masking is also a possibility in this group because I saw quite a few general names.