mark (11/04/82)
Look, people, net.general was not put here for debates like whether the Big Mac or the Whopper is better. What is unfortunate is that by the time you read this, you have already gone past a pile of other nonsense and possibly even fed the flames. Too bad I can't post this to be read first. net.general is there for (1) queries, and (2) announcements, that need to be read by everyone on the whole net. Everyone on the whole net is supposed to subscribe to it. Anything the users do that makes people unsubscribe is bad. This includes the burger debate. In this particular case, the correct thing to do would have been for rochester!avie to have said in the note "please send me mail and I'll tabulate the results". However, Rochester is a new site and probably didn't know the network etiquette. And he did post an article shortly thereafter asking for replies to be mailed. So it's not really his fault (but I bet he'll know better next time). However, so far I have read 6 followups in net.general and countless ones in net.followup. These people should all have known better. Followups to net.general are not supposed to be possible - the followup command automatically changes this to net.followup to keep net.general free of clutter. Those of you who only read net.general and have gotten annoyed should be thankful that most of them went to net.followup. However, there appear to be several sites running old versions of news that neither use net.followup nor put "Re:" in the title; this makes it impossible for people to avoid such debates. These sites appear to include ixlpc, ihuxb, ihnss, wivax, watmath, and cca. I propose that we discuss what, if anything, to do about this in net.news. By the way, this whole burger discussion belonged in net.misc in the first place. Mark Horton