Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!algor2.algorists.com!jeffrey From: jeffrey@algor2.algorists.com (Jeffrey Kegler) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Posting questions to newsgroup you refuse to read - poor etiquette? Message-ID: <1989Nov23.145213.3468@algor2.algorists.com> Date: 23 Nov 89 14:52:13 GMT References: <1989Nov22.195020.805@algor2.algorists.com> <10163@ucsd.Edu> Reply-To: jeffrey@algor2.ALGORISTS.COM (Jeffrey Kegler) Organization: Algorists, Inc. Lines: 48 BK> Article <10163@ucsd.Edu> brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) JK> Article from jeffrey@algor2.ALGORISTS.COM (Jeffrey Kegler) ??> Article in comp.lang.c (no need to identify which) ??> Please mail replys to one of the addresses below - I can no longer ??> afford the time to wade through all of comp.lang.c. JK> I see this sort of thing all the time and it irritates me JK> terribly. This person finds the bandwidth in comp.lang.c too JK> much, but adds to it in a way that benefits nobody but himself. JK> Others following comp.lang.c will (if he gets his way) see only JK> his message and the replies will (he hopes) go straight to him. BK> Say "send mail to me and I'll summarize to the net", which is BK> really the right thing to do when posting an inquiry. If you BK> don't ever post the summary, you've lied. If you do post the BK> summary, you've done The Right Thing according to Usenet protocol. BK> In either case, you don't have to read all the blather in the BK> newsgroup, and you have an instant litmus test as to the BK> intelligence of the people responding to your inquiry - the ones BK> who post the answer anyway are obviously too stupid to understand BK> the concept of summarized responses. Actually for this and other reasons, I also dislike (to a lesser degree) "please E-mail and I will summarize" messages. In my first posting after a long absence from the net (5 years) I read as much of Emily Postnews as I could digest and following her advice, asked for responses to summarize. I will never do so again. I believe that summarizations kill potentially useful discussion. The back and forth which is one of the major benefits of the net over, say, magazines is eliminated. The summarizer is the person who is likely to have the poorest understanding of the issue (unless he asked a question he knows the answer to). If he simply reposts all that he received in the "summary", there result is a message that is long, newsreader-hostile and hard to read. If he redacts it, the result is still often too long, and has no value added. Imagine a poster to comp.lang.c asking one of the Great Pointer Questions and then "summarizing" Chris Torek's response! -- Jeffrey Kegler, Independent UNIX Consultant, Algorists, Inc. jeffrey@algor2.ALGORISTS.COM or uunet!algor2!jeffrey 1762 Wainwright DR, Reston VA 22090