Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!oz.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Filler lines Message-ID: Date: 21 Aug 89 18:21:10 GMT References: <21376@paris.ics.uci.edu> Reply-To: J Greely Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 42 In-reply-to: levine@ics.uci.edu's message of 21 Aug 89 16:36:32 GMT In article <21376@paris.ics.uci.edu> levine@ics.uci.edu (David Levine) writes: >Some mailers refuse to post an followup article that has fewer >new lines that cited lines. This is a good thing. In general, if you don't have as much to say as the person you're replying to, you haven't accomplished anything. Frequently, you see someone quote an entire article, say "Me, too!", and then insert 30 lines of filler. What have they really said? "I agree, but I have nothing to add to your arguments save my agreement." Surely, the author must then feel blessed. >Why is adding filler lines so "bad"? Because you're adding padding to make up for having nothing to say. Consider: the entire body of the article is counted, and only those starting with '>' count against you. That means that the "whosaid" line, as well as any blank lines, are counted as original. Without saying a word, you've got a good start. Now all you have to do in most cases is manage a sentence for every paragraph you're quoting. Easy, no? >A few suggestions I've thought of/heard, which don't convince me: >1) waste bits, Let's say you quote 30 lines of text (common). You add a one line reply. Now you have to add 27 lines of filler to post it. And do you add one character at the beginning of the line? No, you add a line that says "inews filler. ignore", because that's how you've seen it done before. 27*21==567 bytes. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Of course, there are about 3000 articles posted every day, and if even five percent of them follow your model, it adds over 83 Kbytes to a day's news. Personally, I think that articles should be run through 'uniq' before being counted. It wouldn't stop the problem, but maybe we could make it difficult enough that people would break down and trim annotations (or, better yet, say something!). Of course, counting >'s, was supposed to do that too... -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)