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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!dual!lll-lcc!qantel!hplabs!oliveb!glacier!recipes
From: reid@decwrl (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: mod.recipes
Subject: What is mod.recipes? (last updated 2 March 86)
Message-ID: <4825@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 3-Mar-86 02:19:13 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.4825
Posted: Mon Mar  3 02:19:13 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Mar-86 04:51:40 EST
Sender: recipes@glacier.ARPA
Organization: DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 49
Keywords: automatic monthly posting
Approved: reid@glacier.ARPA

Welcome to mod.recipes. This is a "moderated" usenet group, whose purpose is
to distribute a debugged set of online formatted recipes.

The basic idea is that everyone reads through these recipes, saves the ones
he likes and ignores the ones that he doesn't like, and then periodically
prints out a personalized copy of "The USENET Cookbook".

Everything posted to mod.recipes is put there by the newsgroup moderator,
namely me. I am Brian Reid of DEC Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto,
California. The moderator of a newsgroup is something like the editor of a
magazine--I don't write much for it, but I must approve everything that goes
out, and I edit the contributions for spelling, grammar, and stylistic
consistency. Sometimes I add some historical information, or some
commentary on the recipe.

The mod.recipes system is almost completely automated. People submit recipes
by mailing them to a certain mailbox. I proofread each recipe and check the
dubious-looking ones to make sure that they are reasonable. I add a "rating"
of each recipe according to how easy or hard it is to make, and how long it
will take. I also add a copyright notice, copyrighting each recipe for the
"USENET Community Trust", which is a California organization formed for the
purpose of holding that copyright. I then copy the proofread recipes to an
outgoing queue.

Once a week, an automatic program is run that takes the first 4 recipes from
the queue and sends them out to the network. The rate at which recipes go
out is fixed, regardless of the rate at which recipes come in, though if the
recipe arrival rate increases, I will increase the outgoing flow rate
somewhat. I don't have time to proofread more than about 10 recipes a week,
so that will be the absolute limit. At the moment we are in a good
equilibrium with 4 recipes a week, and there is about a 4-week backlog. That
means that I can be gone for 4 weeks and everything will run perfectly in my
absence and you will never even know that I was gone.

As you can see by looking at them, these recipes are encoded in a text
formatting system, and are not ready to print as they stand. The advantage
of this is that they can be formatted for a typesetter or laser printer as
well as an ordinary printer, so that you can use the best printing device
available to print your cookbook.

I have written a set of programs, collectively called "the mod.recipes
software", that must be installed somewhere on your machine before you can
effectivel use these recipes.  In messages that immediately follow this one,
I will post the software sources, the documentation for how to use it, and
the instructions for posting your own recipes.

Brian Reid
decwrl!reid	or	reid@decwrl.dec.com
DEC Western Research Laboratory