Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!david
From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Wish List re: Crossposting
Message-ID: <9491@e.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 31 May 88 22:23:59 GMT
References: <439@bacchus.DEC.COM> <52859@sun.uucp> <9879@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6075@sigi.Colorado.EDU> <1107@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <9297@e.ms.uky.edu> <10879@steinmetz.ge.com> <9352@e.ms.uky.edu> <10960@steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 115

In article <10960@steinmetz.ge.com> welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty) writes:
>In article <9352@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes:
>>Religious arguments happen all the time.  You won't be able to stop
>>that.
>
>>By limiting cross-posting you take away some potentially very useful
>>conversations.  The newsgroup hiearchy *cannot* be a good fit to
>>the topics that are discussable.
>
>Well, I agree that a strict hierarchical organization has several
>obvious problems.  The question is whether some set of restrictions
>might solve some current problems.  As long as a reasonable way of
>coercing Pnews (or whatever) into allowing the behaviour when you really
>want it exists, I still believe that some simple restrictions on
>crossposting would do much, much more good than harm.


Oh good.  We agree ... for the most part

>>The questions is "what is *really* getting 'out of hand'"?  Is it
>>the way people are using the net?  *That* is what I see is getting
>>out of hand.  I see bunches of people running around playing games
>>basically, but the games are disrupting other people and costing
>>places money.
>
>Well, yes, but the only way to control this is either for site
>administrators to jump on their users or for changes to the software
>to make abuse harder.

But there's no protection in the system to begin with.  A lot of
the people playing the games are usually pretty competent with the 
software and can read manual pages to see how to run inews and
feed articles at will into the system.

It's all well and good to come up with a posting program that
fixes the headers with a limited distribution, complains about
cross-posting, and so forth.  And I would go along with such
a posting program.  And so long as I can still do the things
I want to do (and you say you want to be able to do them too)
then *everyone* will be *capable* of doing all the things you say
they should not do.  Not only will they be capable, but the
techniques for doing so will eventually filter out to the people
playing the games...

How easy is it to get around the inews line counter?  How many
people told rn to use a different inclusion character after 2.11
came out?

>well, yeah, but this string of articles is about crossposting,
>and these examples, fine ones though they be, have nothing to do
>with crossposting.

Ever hear about subjects mutating?

>>And yes, flame fests are annoying.  But flame fests are annoying
>>whether or not they are cross-posted.
>
>Yeah, but there'd be a damn site fewer of them if there were restrictions
>on crossposting.

I think this is a circular argument.  You assume that cross-postings
cause flame fests.  I assume that they do not, that flames cause flame
fests.

>>Maybe you could tell me why you think cross-posting is evil
>>in and of itself?
>
>I never said this.  Since I never said this, and don't believe it,
>I won't bother defending it.

Maybe "evil" was a bad word.  You may not have said anything along
those lines but you certainly implied it.

>>  And how does cross-posting encourage flame
>>fests?
>
>Gack.  I think that this has been addressed many times in many groups.
>
>I'll give one example, since you've asked, but if you can't find
>5 or 10 on a superficial search, you're not looking very hard.
>
>Example:  Moron wants lyrics to I-hate-you song from stiv.  Crossposts
>request to n (n>10) newsgroups, including rec.arts.startrek (the correct
>group) and talk.bizarre (most assuredly not the correct newsgroup).
>A flame war then follows where many many trekkies and bizarrites flame
>at each other to get out of each others newsgroups.  A bloody unpleasant
>mess, and throughly unnecessary.  It was rather compounded by a number
>of individuals (on both sides of the fence) who enjoyed the obnoxious
>affair and kept the pressure (and flamage) up.  Never would have happened
>if it were hard to crosspost.  Wasted a lot of bandwidth.

Similar things can happen without cross-posting.  Every newsgroup
in existance has some subject which will cause the readers to go
into conniptions (sp?) and post a 2 page followup disecting the
posting to the nth degree.  

But this could go on and on and on.

As I said above, I would go along with posting programs that watched
for some unusual sorts of postings (crossing top-level boundries,
cross-posting to >3 newsgroups, or whatever) and made mention of
it while composing the article.  Also some sort of default distribution
would be helpful -- configurable on a per-user basis through the
fascist file(?).  But so long as it wasn't hard to get past all
these barriers it would be reasonable.

But I don't think it would make much difference.  Exactly as much
difference as the 4 line signature limit or the > counter has made
in the current software.

-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy                         
<---- s.k.a.: David le casse\*'   {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- 
<---- Goodbye RAH.