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From: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: usenet volume problems...
Message-ID: <1001@zog.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Sun, 8-Jun-86 15:04:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: zog.1001
Posted: Sun Jun  8 15:04:04 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jun-86 01:57:19 EDT
References: <74@rtgvax.UUCP>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 34

In <74@rtgvax.UUCP> ramin@rtgvax proposes that net volume could be
decreased by automatically eliminating quoted material in followup
articles.  The article posting software would replace quoted passages by
escape sequences identifying the original article and the portion quoted.
Then, news reading software would recognize these sequences, look up the
original article, and display the quoted material as if it had been there
all along.  ramin thinks that this would materially reduce transmitted
message volume.  (I agree...)

ramin mentions the problem of followups to articles which have already
been expired at the receiving site, but he misses a much more severe
problem, namely followups to articles *which have not yet arrived* at the
receiving site.  I don't know about other places, but here at CMU it is
very common to see replies to articles that do not show up for another day
or so.  (There are also articles that never turn up at all, due to
problems with our news feed, but that's another story.)  The practice of
extensive quoting makes it possible to follow these out-of-sequence
discussions, but it would be impossible to do so without the quoted
material.

I would suggest a different approach, which would require changing usage
conventions rather than the software.  Instead of quoting major portions
of articles, why not SUMMARIZE -- as I have done above.  All too often, I
see an entire article quoted (including the author's multi-line signature)
when a 3-line summary would have done as well.

All the same, ramin has an interesting idea, which could be neat if
someone can see a way around these problems.  Among other benefits, it
would force everybody to upgrade to a new version of the news software (:-).

				tom lane
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