Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Use and Abuse of USENET
Message-ID: <3506@looking.on.ca>
Date: 13 Jun 89 03:50:48 GMT
Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo Ont.
Lines: 49
Class: information, original

Well, the net.flamoids are predictable as ever, but I won't dwell on them.

It has been a longstanding, but moderately unknown, policy of comp.newprod
that if a product announcement is particularly directed at the readership
of a particular newsgroup, then crossposting is ok.

I naturally checked this with Ron Heiby, Mr. Newprod, before proceding.
Quiet independent of my recent use of it, it is in my opinion a very
sensible policy.  It never made much sense to me to put all the announcements
together in one place, requiring the readership to go through piles of stuff
they don't want just to see the one or two they do.

And comp.newprod, like the other highly commercial groups on USENET, is
reasonably popular.  In fact, it used to draw even higher readership in its
early days, consistently placing amongst the top.

Now, if the announcement of a new alternate network using the famous B
news file format isn't appropriate for news.admin, I don't know what is.

--------

Now I'm not going to use USENET for electronic publishing, although I
would be glad to provide free no-strings-attached stand-alone samples if they
are requested.  (ie. track the China situation in soc.culture.china, boxscores
in comp.sport.baseball, whatever net folk desire.)

But even if I *were* going to use USENET for electronic publishing, say on
a shareware (or 'sharewire!') basis, I will still wonder at the complaint.

To my mind, if you post something people want to read, you are using USENET
well, even helping it.

If you post reams of crap (like flame-rebuttal wars) that nobody wants to
read, then you are abusing USENET.

What you get out of it is your own business and nobody else's.  All that
matters is whether the readers get something out of it.

So the question I would ask is, which of the following is use of usenet
and which is abuse?

	a) Posting material that people desire so much they'll pay money.
	b) Posting flame wars that everybody puts in their kill file.

The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

See you at Usenix.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473