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From: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Automatic posting v 2
Keywords: automatic posting
Message-ID: <151@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Date: 6 Mar 90 02:14:57 GMT
References: <2879@ursa.UUCP> <18094@rpp386.cactus.org> <18096@rpp386.cactus.org>
Reply-To: glenn@heaven.UUCP (Glenn Reid)
Organization: Skyline Press, Woodside CA
Lines: 50

In article <18096@rpp386.cactus.org> woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) writes:
>This posting was developed to answer routine questions. If your question
>falls under one of the listed questions below, you likely will find the 
>answer here.  Please read the post before posting the question.  This has
>2 benefits.  The first is that your question gets answered faster.  The 
>second one is that it reduces traffic on the group.
> 
>NOTE: THIS IS A LONG FILE!  There are a lot of questions and information.

It is my humble opinion that this posting is not what we need.  It is far
too long, answers a strange bunch of questions, and the answers seem to
me to be extremely opinionated.  I don't believe that it will reduce traffic
on the group, and I, for one, don't like the idea of an automatic posting.
I am also not convinced that people's questions will be answered faster,
on the average, since the intersection between precisely these answers and
the average question seems likely to be very small.

A far better way to handle "routine" questions might be to have a friendly
agreement among the readership about who should answer questions, and
have only one person post a response.  That way you get an occasional
short question and a (hopefully) concise answer, which is the best way
to minimize the bandwidth.  Posting a monolothic message every so often
in the off chance that somebody might be wondering and in the even further
off chance that you have answered exactly the right question seems very
questionable to me.  In particular, I could see this generating MORE
discussion rather than less, as people posted follow-up questions and
other people started chirping in.

Also, why does Don Lancaster's phone number appear in the answer to all
of the questions?

So, to summarize, I object to anybody posting regular answers to imagined
questions, and if I am outvoted, then I strongly object to the long-winded
answers, and if I am outvoted again, then I'll just add it to my kill file
and suffer as little as I can.

I also think that, historically, people have done a very nice and concise
job of answering each other's questions, and that there is no particular
reason to "fix" this process.  Adobe answers most of the "technical"
questions, and happy (or unhappy) customers answer the product questions.

I got only four votes for my other idea of splitting off another group for
"PostScript the product", but all of them were "yes" votes.  Not nearly
enough to do anything about it, unfortunately.

Glenn

P.S.  Do any of you long-time netters out there have any statistics from
other newsgroups as to whether or not this technique works?  It can't be
the first time it's been tried.