Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Take a sniff of Gnews
Message-ID: <1509@looking.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 17:51:38 GMT
References: <1501@looking.UUCP> <34@ncar.ucar.edu> <7928@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <25590@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 60

In article <25590@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper) writes:
>Not to mention the obnoxious 50% rule for inclusion of earlier postings.
>Granted, it has spurred people's creativity to come up with bypassing
>techniques like adding a lot of blank lines at the end or substituting ">"
>with some other character. (Fortunately this rule isn't enforced at my site.)
>Whenever I run a program I want to be the one that is in charge, not the
>other way around. Having to fight my way through a set of well intended but
>obnoxious rules questioning the contents of my postings would either give me
>an ulcer or force me off usenet.

A lot of people seem to misunderstand these code features.  You should feel
no prouder in cheating the software than you should at getting off for
a crime due to a technicality.

If one of these rules spots your aritcle, you're getting a big hint that
people don't want to see that sort of article.  This is not a message that
you should try and get around it.   We don't want to see long signatures with
pictures, US Mail addresses, phone numbers and quotes.  We don't want to
see articles where the included material hasn't been compacted and summarized.

Changing the ">" to "+" does not make your article more desirable to people.
It only cheats the software.

I have said this time and time again, but nobody seems to listen.  The net
is for the *readers* and not the posters.  If a software check makes posting
100 times harder, and it helps eliminate 10% of the unwanted articles,
that's worth it.

I used to think that the transmission cost was the big cost in an article.
A typical article costs $10 or so per kilobyte.   The big cost is the
3 seconds spent scanning and rejecting the useless article.  With 15,000
readers, that represents over 12 person-hours of time.  Even at very low
wages, that's around $60 in wasted time.  It's more like $150 at programmer
wages.

[ This only refers to articles that are skipped, which are wasted time.
  Articles that get read take more time, but in theory it isn't wasted.  ]

So if the rules you hate make posting take an extra minute, tough.  If they
stop a bogus article then they save TWELVE HOURS of other people's time.

That's why I advocate:
	o No automatic followup, text inclusion or signature inclusion features.
	o Checking like Matthew described.
	o No posting news while reading news
	o Checking like we have now, for too much inclusion, sig too long
	o Default minimal distribution for articles
	o Much better and more detailed article classifications
	o Lots of small, low-volume newsgroups
	o No posting ability for novice users until they are approved by
	  the site admin.

You may think this somehow abridges your *freedom* of the net.  The point
I'm making is that all the noisemakers abridge everybody's freedom of the
net, and they've forced a great many people to quit the net because of
the noise.  Where's their freedom because they won't speak up?  It seems
we get a nasty positive feedback, where noisemakers scare away everybody
but their kind.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473