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From: control@almsa-1 (William Martin)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: cleaning up the net -- software solutions proposed
Message-ID: <184@almsa-1>
Date: Tue, 16-Jul-85 10:59:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: almsa-1.184
Posted: Tue Jul 16 10:59:29 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jul-85 06:04:39 EDT
References: <2982@nsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: control@almsa-1.UUCP (William Martin)
Distribution: net
Organization: ALMSA-1, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 41

The article-length restriction cannot be applied to the "fa" groups, as
digests there are long intentionally. It should not be applied to the
"mod" groups, as some of those post in digest form, and, anyhow, their
contents are, by definition, pre-screened for suitability, so there is
no reason to impose outside restrictions.

Because this cannot be applied across the board, I think it will be a
mistake to impose it at all. There are many non-flame good and rewarding
long postings on the net -- I can think of quite a few off the top of my
head: there is a regular and quite long religious-lesson posted weekly
or so in net.religion.jewish, there was an excellent survey of
construction techniques posted in net.analog, net.ham-radio regularily
has long equipment reviews and lists of frequencies to monitor, there
have been long summaries of product info in net.consumers, a long
article on built-in sprinkler systems in net.garden, etc., etc. -- the
list is probably endless.

I often post long stuff myself. I take pride, though, in avoiding the
annoying practice of including much of the preceeding discussion -- the
worst technique is to have many many lines preceeded by ">"s with just
a few lines of newly-added text. I give the net readership credit for
remembering what has been recently discussed; after all, I do, so you
all are also expected to have the same qualifications I have... A short
summary (newly-written) of the context is all that is needed to remind
people of what has gone before. If a long posting is freshly written,
and not a rehash of what has been read before, that length is probably
worthwhile.

So, instead of arbitrary length restrictions, remove the "F" command
from readnews and change postnews' follow-up action to not include the
original posting. (That is, if you want to make any software changes at
all in this area -- I think a user-education program, which would be
aimed at those who include lots of previously-posted stuff in their
postings, whould be just as good, and probably better.)

You will note that I did *not* include any of Chuq's message in this one.

Regards,
Will Martin

ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA    UUCP/Usenet: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin