JSHIN@HAMPVMS.BITNET ("No, me?") (02/19/90)
Hello... This is in response to Richard Loken (did I spell it right? If not, thousand apologies...)'s question regarding binary source posting. As far as I know, the way these discussion groups work is that when one sends a message to the group's "base," the base cc's the message to all of the members (hence the name "list"). Often, as is the case with info-cpm (or comp.source.cpm, or something like that as you call it), the groups bases are located in an internet site or a uunet site (or whatever else have you), which makes it inconvenienet to forward ALL of the messages through the gateways over into other networks (over 10 per day, depending on the group), especially BITNET. Now, I would imagine that most source codes, UUencoded and what not, would be far greater than 10 kilobytes. Just imagin hundreds and thousands of copies of these flooding across ALL of the nets possibly imaginable. Also, let's consider the fact that most of the gateway'ed messages are "digested" into a bundle of more than one - I've seen one from dist-ibmpc that was about 30 messages long - messages. Since the digests are organized alphabetically, the source is bound to be stuck somewhere in the middle of the digest. For some mailer programs, you have to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of it until you get to the next message. No way skipping. Now, let us consider some of us, like me, who are still struggling with a 300-baud (or even 1200-baud) modem all the way through the pages-long source code just to get to the next message, whose content one knows only vaguely through the often uninformative subject lines. Would this convince you of the impropriety of source posting? Instead, you can just post a message asking if people want the source, and if they reply, send the source. Maybe, just maybe, this IS what you meant by "source posting." In that case, this message is misdirected.... I'm sorry. I'm also sorry that this message was so long. I imagine this would be the last of this sort, but first on the digest (starts with "B"). Thanks..... John P.S. at least I don't use lines-long signatures... :-) P.P.S. Keith; if you think this is too long, could you omit this from the digests?