reid@decwrl.UUCP (12/08/86)
Several hundred votes are in, and they are running about 30 to 1 in favor of
keeping the cleartext recipes, and about 10 to 1 in favor of keeping them in
mod.recipes. In about 500 messages over the last week, only about 40 people
(less than 10%) are opposed to the cleartext recipes. Interestingly enough,
the people who are opposed to them have tended to be more abrasive in their
messages. A typical message in favor of cleartext is something like this one
(all names removed because it's not relevant who said what):
Post cleartext to net.cooks, then I can unsubscribe from mod.recipes.
I am interested in the recipes but not in the software for the
cookbook, nor the un-cleartext recipes.
A typical message against cleartext is something like this one:
The people who want cleartext are either too lazy or too ignorant
to learn how to do it right. They are weenies. Please don't waste
perfectly good disk space trying to humor them.
The majority of people want the cleartext recipes all together. A
plurality want the cleartext of any given recipe to come first. So
what I'm going to try to do (as soon as I figure out how) is to post
all of the cleartext recipes in any given week first, and then post
all of the real recipes. Because of the way that my posting software
is set up, this is actually a pretty difficult thing to do (the
cleartext recipes are created, one at a time, by running each recipe
through nroff just as it is posted). I don't promise to make this
change instantly. Probably what I'll do is set up a local group on
decwrl, post all of the recipes to that group, make all the cleartext
copies, post them, and then move all of the posted recipes from the
local group into mod.recipes. What a kludge.
Here are a dozen or so typical comments.
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====>>>> Keep posting the clear text recipes here. There's
too much clutter in net.cooks (or whatever it is now)
====>>>> Do what ever you like with the other stuff. I don't
use the recipe software (although I have it). I use
vi instead to put the recipies into readable form
(or did before the clear text stuff).
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Quite frankly, I'm not sure why anybody would want to go to the trouble
of keeping the software on hand, and having to format the recipes to
print them. The cleartext versions you've posted are all formatted nicely,
and look well when printed on any standard letter quality printer.
I assume that the folks who absolutely can't abide the cleartext versions
simply like to play with programs. Surely a much larger waste of time
than hitting the "n" key.
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Why don't you post a single program (nroff macros?) that can be used to
convert the troff format to plaintext without doing anything else to it?
That way people who don't want to use the cookbook software can just pipe
all of the posted recipes in which they ae interested through that filter.
With this there would be no need for plaintext postings.
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Put me down for a big yes on Cleartext recipes! As to
whether they are put in mod.recipes or rec.food.cooking
(net.cooks) I don't care. I just don't want to see
them go away!
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Where the cleartext recipes are posted doesn't matter to me, as long as I know
where they are so that I can use them.
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I don't care where the cleartext recipes are posted, as long as I
know where they will be so that I can ignore them.
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Personally, I prefer that both versions stay in mod.recipes only. I prefer
to read the cleartext to decide if I like the overall recipe, and then archive
the "real" recipe if I do. Putting them in separate newsgroups would
interfere with that.
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I am dead-set _against_ moving the cleartext to .cooks. I can't get
the @&%&$%\ ! software to run on my system, and I don't want to wade
through the arugments about what kind of knife is best for peeling
asparagus to find the cleartext recipes "over there." (Attempted
bribe time: I promise that if you keep the cleartexts in m.r I'll
submit some recipes in '87 ((If I can figure out how to do the
formatting...)). I _know_ you have a surplus right now, but can you
count on that continuing? :*)
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1. i do not read net.cooks
2. i don't have easy access to t/nroff
3. i love the cleartext and don't think hitting n is too hard
4. please don't make me go read net.cooks
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As someone who had to give up mod.recipes after I moved to Sun
(that damn tmac problem), I would *love* to see the recipes in
cleartext in net.cooks (or rec.food.cooking).
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Here's my vote to keep the cleartext copies. I have been downloading
the recipes that I want to my Macintosh and reformatting them before
printing so they will fit in my own recipes file. The removal of the
strange formatting and metric measurements makes the process just that
much easier.
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About the cleartext copies: my wife and I welcome them. We usually only
want a few of the posted recipes, and prefer to copy them down by hand
anyway. The new method makes that much easier--reading troff code is not much
fun.
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Well, I really appreciate having the cleartext versions. We haven't
gotten around to installing the recipe software here, and it will
probably be some time before our overworked system administrator
can get around to it. I don't quite understand why people can't
just 'n' over the cleartext versions if they don't like them, or
better yet, edit their kill file to automatically annihilate them
(oops, maybe not everyone uses 'rn'; do other newsreaders have a
similar feature?).
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Good, or bad, I will also express my negative impressions of the
new "cleartext" double postings.
*) Twice (or more) the amount of net traffic for the group
*) Twice as many posted articles to decide to save/delete
or track
To me, the better decision was the software "tools" previously
posted (not by the moderator) that allowed a reader to [nt]roff
only the newly posted recipes while also creating a complete and
revised index.
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First, another vote agains clear text in mod.recipes. it's a waste
of space/bandwdith/etc.
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Now that I've seen the categories, can I change my vote to "you're a
disgusting piece of slime"? I like the sound of it better.
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