Xref: utzoo news.admin:14552 news.software.b:7857 Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: <1991May21.190510.15062@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Tue, 21 May 1991 19:05:10 GMT References: <1991May16.151523.28123@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May18.211109.20401@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May20.093018@mccall.com> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology In article <1991May20.093018@mccall.com> tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot) writes: >Are you saying that this is a problem that doesn't merit attention? ... No, that it's a problem that is very difficult to solve, and that the naive solutions which people constantly propose have unacceptably nasty side effects. >This could have been done with prior announcement, an attempt to find >non-conforming news software and notify users and authors of the impending >change, and some mechanism to ease the transition ... Both announcement and prior investigation were done. There is a limit to how effective the prior investigation could be, however, given very limited manpower and the way B News sites hide problems by rewriting headers. As for transition mechanisms, this is yet another area where things could be improved if we had plenty of paid staff. As it is, we just have to decide "that's good enough -- ship it" at some point. >You could have even done something reasonable, like in this version bitching >about the formatting problem, but accepting it, and in the NEXT version, >rejecting it. That would have given the rest of the net some chance fix our >software BEFORE you started throwing away articles. Our overwhelming experience is that nobody bothers until we start throwing away articles. Warnings simply don't get heeded, not widely and consistently. There is simply too much inertia. >>[preserving evidence] >Maybe you should have thought it out a little further before releasing this >version? See above comments on manpower. -- And the bean-counter replied, | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "beans are more important". | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry