Some Newsgroups have never recovered from flame wars. Often, the person sending the spam will forge a fake e-mail address to avoid receiving flames. For example, posting a message to alt.satanism and rec.music.christian. From then on, all messages posted in that thread go to both groups, which often results in severe flame wars. As the Internet has grown dramatically, Usenet Newsgroups have seemingly gotten more eclectic in nature.
Users can discuss their favorite cereals on alt.cereal or their cats on rec.pets.cats.
Things can also get very weird in the Newsgroups, and that is what the regulars on rec.pets.cats found out several years ago. They began to post messages to rec.pets.cats describing things that would make most cat lovers cringe with disgust. Wired has also been documenting a battle between alt.religion.scientology and representatives of the Church of Scientology. Several disenfranchised former Scientologists have been posting CoS scriptures to alt.religion.scientology. These are scriptures that CoS members usually have to pay thousands of dollars to obtain, and the church maintains that copyrighted materials are being posted to the Newsgroup without permission.