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From: jbatson@tron.bbn.com.bbn.com (James Batson)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Novel new idea to stop followups
Message-ID: <19046@bbn.COM>
Date: Mon, 7-Dec-87 11:01:11 EST
Article-I.D.: bbn.19046
Posted: Mon Dec  7 11:01:11 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Dec-87 12:41:13 EST
References: <1173@looking.UUCP> <2476@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <2063@isis.UUCP>
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In article <2063@isis.UUCP> aburt@isis.UUCP (Andrew Burt) writes:
>First let's get straight what problem it is we're trying to solve.  I see
>two offhand: (1) Person replies only to find a later msg in the group says
>the same thing (i.e., the effort was wasted);...
>
>...      (1) is a valid concern of mine.  I know a solution I would like to
>see for this would be: For the newsreader programs, particularly rn, to
>display after the subject, "[NNN more articles with same subject]".
>
>Presuming people keep the subject lines meaningful and without needless
>change, as many people do, it is then obvious whether it is time to think
>about following up yet or not; I think the natural tendency would be to
>wait for it to read "[0 more ...]" before hitting the 'f' key.
>Andrew Burt 				   			isis!aburt


There is an important feature you may miss here, Andrew.  Usually,
people are following up on a specific article, and a larger percentage
of folks are using 'F' than 'f'.

One possible solution might be to re-implement 'f' and 'F' in the
newsreaders to MARK articles as ones which a user want's to follow up
on, but not invoke the post routines until all articles with the same
subject have been read.

Now this doesn't prevent the user from, say, escaping to the shell,
posting a follow-up, and returning to the news reader.  However, since
many users use 'F', they will want to preserve lines to place in their
follow up.  Without a multiple-window screen with cut-paste facilities,
the 'escape-to-shell' bit doesn't work too good for 'F' posters.  In
any case, the 'escape-to-shell' may be just sufficiently more difficult
than waiting till all articles have been read that users will "suffer"
through reading all the postings before writing their own.

Certainly, the time elapsed until they get to actually draft their
follow up will have it's universal effect of dulling highly emotional
reactions, and maybe the length of flames will decrease given this.

Comments?

Jay Batson
ARPA:	jbatson@bbn.com
UUCP:	...!rutgers!harvard!bbn.com!jbatson