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From: aburt@isis.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: inews stupidity
Message-ID: <1852@isis.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Jun-87 09:40:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: isis.1852
Posted: Wed Jun  3 09:40:49 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Jun-87 04:48:21 EDT
References: <1211@cullvax.UUCP> <1324@mmm.UUCP> <2732@phri.UUCP> <706@hao.UCAR.EDU> <5920@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: aburt@isis.UUCP (Andrew Burt)
Organization: Math/CS, University of Denver
Lines: 23

I agree the new/old ratio of text is not the best approach to prevent
over-inclusion of old articles.  I further agree with Roy that diff'ing the
old vs. new would not be accurate enough.  For any method that we could
think of people would think of simple work arounds:  Diffing the tail of
the line could easily be defeated by adding a | to the ends of lines; a
more sophisticated effort might cause people to replace all spaces with _'s.

So how about this.  When someone replies and requests inclusion of the
old article (e.g., 'F' in rn, but not 'f') they are told that if they don't
make the new/old ratio high (above 1) then they risk the flaming wrath of
thousands of net readers followed by a yes/no question, "Do you understand
this?".  That is, educate the user on the spot, not via a newusers
article read long ago or not at all.  All that would be needed are the
addition of yes/no prompts to rn/readnews/etc.

Locally I have found even a mild threat of flaming has kept even very
flamboyant personalities from posting.  This wasn't the intended effect
but it demonstrates that fear of flaming is a powerful weapon.
-- 

Andrew Burt 				   			isis!aburt

              Fight Denver's pollution:  Don't Breathe and Drive.