thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (02/17/86)
In net.news.group article <7031@ki4pv.UUCP> tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Tanner Andrews) writes: >Considering the amount of traffic in this newsgroup, so much of which >consists in >'ed copy of earlier text with the added text "good idea" >or "lousy idea" We recently (finally) upgraded our news software to (I believe) 2.10.3 (came with the 4.3 beta release), and it has an interesting (optional) feature in inews. If an article is posted (locally) with more "included" text than "original" text, inews rejects it. If every site on the net enabled this feature, it would probably help the over-quoting problem a lot. Of course, to really clamp down (and get lots of "Hitlerite" hate mail), the backbone sites could implement the feature for ALL news passing through (presumably mailing the article back to the originator). Of course, the system is subject to abuse. One can easily bypass the check by changing the string used to mark inclusions to (say) "->" or "' ". But I bet it would help. Resignedly yours, -- =Spencer ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA)