Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Novel new idea to stop followups Message-ID: <1173@looking.UUCP> Date: Sun, 29-Nov-87 01:34:04 EST Article-I.D.: looking.1173 Posted: Sun Nov 29 01:34:04 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 1-Dec-87 03:34:43 EST Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo Ont. Lines: 32 Xref: utgpu news.admin:1281 news.software.b:921 I just had an interesting thought for future versions of news. People in the past have suggested that followups shouldn't be done until after all the news in a group is read. Here's a further suggestion. Change inews so that it rejects any local poster who is: a) in rn, readnews, vnews or any other news reading program b) accessed his .newsrc file within say, the last half hour. That way you really have to think about a followup. Any followup that you would "forget to post" under these restrictions wasn't worth posting by my definitions. Anybody who really felt they had something to say would still get to say it -- nobody would be censored. People who wanted to include text could still do it, but they would have to work at it. Of course, mail replies would suffer no restriction! Those in the heat of passion would be much more predisposed to mail than posting. I suppose that there are some truly useful immediate followups -- certain types of direct responses, etc. We could include a "deliberate bypass" feature that would allow people to post some things immediately, but their articles would be heavily flagged with indicators saying how the article was posted, and people who abused this would show up in kill and fascist files fairly quickly. It would also stop the "try rn every 10 minutes to see if there's anything new" folks. For you folks, "GET A LIFE!!!" as Bill Shatner would say. You make call this drastic, but people are leaving the net in great numbers these days. Almost as fast as people are joining. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473