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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!topaz.rutgers.edu!brandx.rutgers.edu!webber
From: webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Postive vs Negative Features (was: Re: Novel new idea to stop...)
Message-ID: <635@brandx.rutgers.edu>
Date: Tue, 1-Dec-87 05:50:10 EST
Article-I.D.: brandx.635
Posted: Tue Dec  1 05:50:10 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Dec-87 23:08:43 EST
References: <1173@looking.UUCP> <1178@looking.UUCP>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 91
Xref: mnetor news.admin:1465 news.software.b:1001

In article <1178@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
> Several people, including Bob Webber, have sent me descriptions of ways
> one might get around a "pause and reflect" posting restriction.
> 
> I think people are missing the point here.  Of *course* there are lots of
> ways around any scheme.  Hell, anybody can uux rnews if they want!
> 
> People who want to abuse the net with technical tricks will always be
> able to do so.
> 
> The point is, to reduce netnoise, you don't have to hit everybody.  Just
> the average poster.  If some people want to write special programs to
> sneak around things, let them do it.

Actually, the real point is no one likes to be ``hit.''  So besides
the people who work out the workarounds there will be all the people
who occasionally get ticked off because this feature creeps up on them
at a time when they are not in a good mood.  All in all, it lessens
the moral of the net and increases the poster vs. maintainer situation
where people don't see themselves as abusing the net but rather
abusing the person who presumed to impose so totally artificial
restriction of dubious value upon them.

Instead of putting in such a negative feature, it would be better to
work toward making it easier to for people to postpone their
followups.  Doubtless some news reader already has this feature, but
unless a feature is put in most of the news readers, it will tend to
miss alot of people.  The biggest thing preventing delayed followups
is the annoyance of tracking down the messages you want to follow up
to.  Right now, what I do is write their numbers down on a piece of
paper and then once I am done reading, go back and hunt them up and
post the replies via postnews.

What would be better (and hence encourage more people to delay
followups) would be if you could save messages off into a followup
directory.  Then, once you are done reading, go back and invoke news
on the followup directory rather than on the /usr/spool/news directory
that it normally accesses.  You could then relook at the messages you
saved and post your followups at leasure not having to worry about the
system expunging the message you wanted to followup to, etc.

Another thing that would encourage people to reply to the poster (an
hence cut down on the initial round of redundancy) rather than post
into the group would be if it was easier for the original poster to
redirect incoming mail into news.  Right now it is a bit of a
nuissance for an average poster to post reply messages in to the group
(thus becoming a quasi-moderator for the discussion stream of
responses to their original reply).  A fix to mail that made it as
easy for the querier to post into news a reply recieved from mail as
to reply via mail that that information had already been recieved
would encourage greater usage of mail reply for answering general
information questions.  Similarly, it might be worthwhile to have a
``metoo'' option that sent an automatic mail message to a querier
indicating that you were also interested in any replies they recieved
on their query.  It is a classic situation that the more a poster does
to discourage net replies the more people are encouraged to voice the
fact that they too are interested in the information and don't want to
miss out on any of the juicy details sent the original querier.

For that matter, a really spiffy news-poster program (basically a memo
writer with concurrent spelling checker, outline manager, etc.) that
was not encorporated in a news reader program would do alot to
encourage people to separate the functionality of reading and posting.

Or a feature that lets you stop in mid-reply and continue the reply
later (i.e., understands a partial reply format so that you can write
a message to yourself to go home and look something up and then come
in the next day and finish off the reply --- how many times have you
seen postings where the poster sent information and then stated that
they didn't know if it was really accurate since the reference they
needed to double check was home, so they are posting thier partial
memory now -- thrills).

Basically, it is in a person's self interest to not interrupt their
reading with replies, so it is just necessary to make it easy enough
to do what they want to do.  [Think of all the time I could have saved
if someone else had posted this message to you!]

Of course, alot of these features can be gotten by the same kinds of
`technical tricks' that workaround the restrictions you propose.
However, just as your restrictions catch most people because the
`technical tricks' are inconvenient for them, so the current software
is often suboptimally used because it is ``inconvenient'' to do things
optimally.  Making the software harder to use to adjust the balance
of difficulty for some of the subtasks is not a solution!

>...  Isn't that *special*?  Don't we feel just a bit *superior*?

What's this ``we'' business?  Is someone pregnant?

------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)