Xref: utzoo news.software.b:7826 comp.groupware:560 comp.infosystems:249 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.groupware,comp.infosystems Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: Date: 20 May 91 14:42:38 GMT References: <1991May18.122602.12184@mp.cs.niu.edu> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 53 rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: > In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) w [ Talking about C News ] > >It loses articles unnecessarily, without reporting its delivery failure to > >the originator. > > > >I call that broken. > > I don't. Good work, Henry and Geoff, in improving quality. "Improving quality"? I spend sometimes *literally hours* writing stuff to post to Usenet, stuff which I know people like to read and which I get fan mail for, C News throws all that away silently because of a missing comma in the news header, and you tell me it's "improving quality"? What the hell kind of quality improvement is that? You may not like my postings; you may not even read the newsgroups I generally post in. But to say that silently throwing away everything I write is a "quality improvement" is grossly offensive. I didn't see alt.flame in the newsgroups line. > In principle, email is person to person communication. Getting the message > through is therefore the principle. Adherence to exact standards is not > as important (as long as this does not cause system problems), as getting the > message to its destination. Sender and recipient can have their own private > arguments about standards. (No debates about this here, please. This is > a forum on news software). > > News, on the other hand, is public, not private. It is in some sense, a fo > of publication. Any failure to observe standards is an imposition on the > general public, so the publisher (in this case the news software, under > supervision of the administrator), has a higher obligation to maintain > accepted standards. This is truly bizarre. You seem to be saying that the form of publication of news is more important than its content. C News silently discarding articles with bad headers is like a newspaper silently discarding letters and other correspondence which have the date missing, and only publishing things which agree with their own standards for spelling, punctuation and layout. I'm adding comp.infosystems and comp.groupware to the newsgroups line, because I'm sure they'll be interested in your opinions. (I'm not being sarcastic, by the way.) mathew