Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!unmvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: digests on USENET Message-ID: Date: 14 Aug 89 16:29:32 GMT References: <3962@looking.on.ca> <1989Aug14.140248.12480@talos.uucp> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Bob Sutterfield Followup-To: news.admin Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 32 In-reply-to: kjones@talos.uucp's message of 14 Aug 89 14:02:48 GMT In article <1989Aug14.140248.12480@talos.uucp> kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) writes: Why do digests appear at all on USENET? There are good reasons for using them with mailing lists, but none of them seem to apply to USENET. Many newsgroups began life as mailing lists. Larger and more successful mailing lists are often moderated and digestified, to increase S/N and decrease the number of individual messages generating bounce-o-grams coming back to the list maintainer. When such lists are gatewayed, it is often to a moderated newsgroup and in a digestified form. Some more enlightened list moderators/digestifiers (e.g. wnl of Sun-Spots fame) have agreed to set things up so that the newsgroup side sees individual articles, while the mailing list side still sees the digests. This is somewhat difficult to do the first time, but once the tee is in place it flows smoothly enough. Thenceforth, both the list-based people and the newsgroup-based people are happy because they get the same information in a form that is convenient to them. Some older mailing list maintainers are crufty old ARPAnauts who see no particular benefit to this news stuff, or don't have the time to devote to a complete reworking of how their still-successful mailing list procedures function. This is their prerogative, and if we want to read their lists we simply must adapt. Most such lists are at the top of the S/N, reading quality, and usefulness scales, and I for one am happy to have the opportunity to read them at all, let alone in news. The list maintainers didn't have to agree to the gateway in the first place, after all. That's why news reading user agents often have special functions for handling digests more conveniently: historical precedent and intertia.