Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!nbires!hao!ico!rcd
From: rcd@ico.UUCP (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: The 50% rule is in--now what?
Message-ID: <172@ico.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Nov-86 19:50:19 EST
Article-I.D.: ico.172
Posted: Wed Nov 12 19:50:19 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Nov-86 04:00:08 EST
References: <212@cartan.Berkeley.EDU>
Lines: 36

> OK everybody, we've all seen the growing rash of people padding their
> postings with 50% rule killers...
> ...I positively cannot stand these deadwood 50% rule killers.

> Am I alone here?

They bug me too, yet I wrote my first add-some-drivel-to-get-it-out paragraph
back when playing with 2.10.3, and I'll probably do it again in the future.
I guess we should take it as a painful lesson in human engineering of
software...I think the problem was predictable.  If you DIDN'T edit the
parent article down to get rid of junk, you might feel duly chastised by
the complaint and go back to take care of it.  But suppose that you already
spent some time trimming the included text...it just happened to be messy
to trim.  Suppose further that you found you could say what you wanted to
say fairly concisely.  The stupid posting gets bounced, and as I remember
it's inews that bounces it so you can't conveniently dodge it.  The first
reaction is probably anger at software that's trying to be smarter than it
can be, and the first response is probably to try to foil the software...
after all, you already complied with the rule (Don't include extraneous
text) in spirit, right?  So you do what you must to comply with the letter
of the rule.

> I propose that it be lowered to 40% new material, applied to longer
> postings only, and that the bounce message be more to the point, with
> strong encouragement to edit/paraphrase the original better.

I suggest that those of us who don't need quite so much hand-holding out of
the software put in hooks (which may be slightly difficult for rank
neophytes to find) to disable the checking.  There's an awful lot of this
sort of help-for-the-novice/annoyance-for-the-frequent-user in 2.11.  (If I
have to watch that essay out of postnews on choosing newsgroups one more
time at 1200 baud or below, I swear I'll kill it even if it means adb-ing
the postnews object file!)
-- 
Dick Dunn    {hao,nbires,cbosgd}!ico!rcd	(303)449-2870
   ...Cerebus for dictator!