Membership in AAAAARGHSTOP is open to any Australian who has ever sighed audibly at a form. Below, our tiers, our roster (redacted, for their protection and ours), and - the part everyone actually scrolled down for - our cross-membership arrangements.
| Tier | Requirements | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary Member | Attend one (1) meeting, or credibly claim to have | Voting rights, tea room access |
| Life Member | Ten years' continuous complaining about acronyms | Voting rights, tea room access, a badge that says LIFE MEMBER in Comic Sans (non-negotiable) |
| Honorary Life-Long Sufferer of Corporate Jargon | Survive one (1) all-hands meeting containing the phrase "let's take this offline to circle back on the synergies" | Our deepest sympathies |
| Cross-Member | Hold concurrent membership in a fellow Usenet-adjacent institution (see below) | A nod of recognition at conferences neither organisation actually holds |
Many of our most senior members hold concurrent, entirely coincidental membership in the Australian Chapter of the Lumber Cartel - the shadowy, deeply fictional consortium of timber interests that Usenet spammers spent the better part of a decade insisting was secretly funding anti-spam volunteers to protect paper mail from the email revolution.
As every anti-spam veteran knows: There Is No Lumber Cartel (TINLC). We are merely honoured to be counted among its entirely nonexistent membership, and to display its entirely nonexistent logo below with entirely nonexistent pride.
Special mention this month to LumberCartel - Local 42 (Canadian Branch), who wrote in to congratulate us on the site and, in the finest tradition of 2003, link to us from theirs. Reciprocal linking is not dead, it was merely resting. Their library is linked in the footer below.
A significant fraction of our founding membership cut their teeth on news.admin.net-abuse.email - the newsgroup where the internet's spam wars were fought, one killfile and one cancelbot at a time, back when "block list" was two words and everybody had an opinion about open relays. If you know what a "make.money.fast" thread was, you may already qualify for membership. If you still have a MAPS RBL bumper sticker, you may already be a Life Member and simply haven't been informed.
Chairs meetings. Adjourns meetings. Occasionally holds meetings in between. Title inherited, not elected - the paperwork for an election was deemed too acronym-heavy to process.
First responder to field reports of "ATM Machine" signage. Carries a laminated card listing every redundant acronym known to humankind. Card is now on its third laminate.
Attends Cartel meetings that do not occur, at a venue that does not exist, and reports back with minutes that are, appropriately, entirely blank.
"I joined for the acronym-fighting. I stayed for the biscuits." - Anonymous Life Member, minutes of a meeting nobody can locate