Operating System Advocacy - Usenet and Other Advocacy Forums

Usenet and Other Advocacy Forums

Due to the often emotional nature of advocacy debate and its sometimes narrow appeal to the wider user population, forums for discussion of advocacy are often separate from those for general discussion. For example, the comp.os.ms-windows Usenet hierarchy has a group reserved solely for advocacy—the Guide to the Windows newsgroups exhorts Usenet posters not to "get involved in arguments about Windows vs. OS/2 vs. Macintosh vs. NeXTSTEP except in the comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy group."

Operating system advocacy discussions, on Usenet and elsewhere, have spawned a variety of jargon describing commonly seen behaviour, including "MicroDroid" and "Amiga Persecution Complex". The emotional form and negative characteristics often associated with operating system advocacy have led some to create guidelines explaining what they consider to be positive advocacy, such as the Linux Advocacy Guidelines and the Guidelines for Effective OS/2 Advocacy.