Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site afinitc.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!afinitc!mvg
From: mvg@afinitc.UUCP (Mark Grieshaber)
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: TWO CONSIDERATIONS IN ROTATING JOKES.
Message-ID: <241@afinitc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 10:56:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: afinitc.241
Posted: Thu May 17 10:56:04 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 18-May-84 05:57:07 EDT
Organization: Affinitec, St. Louis MO
Lines: 34


    Just another minor point or two to consider in the uses of rot13:
Jokes are for fun, consequently I (and many others I suspect) believe in
sharing them with friends (how many times have you retold a joke you
heard here first?).  In particular, I periodically bundle a couple
hundred jokes (minus headers and such) for a friend of mine with whom I
trade jokes frequently.  She in turn takes them into work and distributes
them to her friends (she works at a *very* large place - you folks have
a larger distribution than you may think!).  Since many rotated jokes
do *not* make mention of the fact in the subject line, it is difficult to
automatically extract them for separate decoding, so unfortunately, she
gets lots of rotated jokes in the list (or worse, just the punchlines are
rotated, but the leadin is not).  Now, how many people are going to manually
unrotate a joke?  Perhaps one line or so, but not much more.  It is also
not reasonable to manually go through each joke to pick out the rotated ones
(I bundle them hundreds at a time!).  I know, I could list them on a piece
of paper as I read them the first time (which I end up doing).  So far as
just *reading* the jokes go, I don't mind backing up and unrotating it, or
reading the unrotated part, backing up and unrotating the rotated part (no
vnews, obviously (oh yes, those who don't have it may be able to get it,
but others may not, or may have long delays - what about them?)).  If each
rotated joke were:
    1. Noted in the header in some way (e.g.: rot, rot13, r13, ROT, etc...),
    2. Completely rotated (not just certain lines),
it would:
    1. Please everyone who doesn't have vnews,
    2. Stop all the complaints about how hard it is to backup, unrotate, etc,
    3. Make it easy to shell script the rotated jokes out and decode them
       separately for others with no net access.  (A bit of self interest!).
Note that all of the above is simply nice, not necessary.  Personally, when
someone asks for a favor that is no effort (as in rotating all of a joke),
why not?  If more jokes come in that don't fit the above, it's no real
problem to simply continue as usual, but it would be nice if...
    Mark Grieshaber  (ihnp4!afinitc!mvg)  St. Louis, MO