webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) (12/01/87)
In article <1178@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: > Several people, including Bob Webber, have sent me descriptions of ways > one might get around a "pause and reflect" posting restriction. > > I think people are missing the point here. Of *course* there are lots of > ways around any scheme. Hell, anybody can uux rnews if they want! > > People who want to abuse the net with technical tricks will always be > able to do so. > > The point is, to reduce netnoise, you don't have to hit everybody. Just > the average poster. If some people want to write special programs to > sneak around things, let them do it. Actually, the real point is no one likes to be ``hit.'' So besides the people who work out the workarounds there will be all the people who occasionally get ticked off because this feature creeps up on them at a time when they are not in a good mood. All in all, it lessens the moral of the net and increases the poster vs. maintainer situation where people don't see themselves as abusing the net but rather abusing the person who presumed to impose so totally artificial restriction of dubious value upon them. Instead of putting in such a negative feature, it would be better to work toward making it easier to for people to postpone their followups. Doubtless some news reader already has this feature, but unless a feature is put in most of the news readers, it will tend to miss alot of people. The biggest thing preventing delayed followups is the annoyance of tracking down the messages you want to follow up to. Right now, what I do is write their numbers down on a piece of paper and then once I am done reading, go back and hunt them up and post the replies via postnews. What would be better (and hence encourage more people to delay followups) would be if you could save messages off into a followup directory. Then, once you are done reading, go back and invoke news on the followup directory rather than on the /usr/spool/news directory that it normally accesses. You could then relook at the messages you saved and post your followups at leasure not having to worry about the system expunging the message you wanted to followup to, etc. Another thing that would encourage people to reply to the poster (an hence cut down on the initial round of redundancy) rather than post into the group would be if it was easier for the original poster to redirect incoming mail into news. Right now it is a bit of a nuissance for an average poster to post reply messages in to the group (thus becoming a quasi-moderator for the discussion stream of responses to their original reply). A fix to mail that made it as easy for the querier to post into news a reply recieved from mail as to reply via mail that that information had already been recieved would encourage greater usage of mail reply for answering general information questions. Similarly, it might be worthwhile to have a ``metoo'' option that sent an automatic mail message to a querier indicating that you were also interested in any replies they recieved on their query. It is a classic situation that the more a poster does to discourage net replies the more people are encouraged to voice the fact that they too are interested in the information and don't want to miss out on any of the juicy details sent the original querier. For that matter, a really spiffy news-poster program (basically a memo writer with concurrent spelling checker, outline manager, etc.) that was not encorporated in a news reader program would do alot to encourage people to separate the functionality of reading and posting. Or a feature that lets you stop in mid-reply and continue the reply later (i.e., understands a partial reply format so that you can write a message to yourself to go home and look something up and then come in the next day and finish off the reply --- how many times have you seen postings where the poster sent information and then stated that they didn't know if it was really accurate since the reference they needed to double check was home, so they are posting thier partial memory now -- thrills). Basically, it is in a person's self interest to not interrupt their reading with replies, so it is just necessary to make it easy enough to do what they want to do. [Think of all the time I could have saved if someone else had posted this message to you!] Of course, alot of these features can be gotten by the same kinds of `technical tricks' that workaround the restrictions you propose. However, just as your restrictions catch most people because the `technical tricks' are inconvenient for them, so the current software is often suboptimally used because it is ``inconvenient'' to do things optimally. Making the software harder to use to adjust the balance of difficulty for some of the subtasks is not a solution! >... Isn't that *special*? Don't we feel just a bit *superior*? What's this ``we'' business? Is someone pregnant? ------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)
blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) (12/03/87)
In article <635@brandx.rutgers.edu> webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes: [Some sugestions I agree with. He has several good ideas that I edited out because I didn't have anything to add.] >Instead of putting in such a negative feature, it would be better to >work toward making it easier to for people to postpone their >followups. >Doubtless some news reader already has this feature, but >unless a feature is put in most of the news readers, it will tend to >miss alot of people. The biggest thing preventing delayed followups >is the annoyance of tracking down the messages you want to follow up >to. I use the M feature of rn for this. Cross-posted articles are the main problem with this tecnique. >Or a feature that lets you stop in mid-reply and continue the reply >later I do this by writing the reply I am editing to a file and abort, then later using Pnews including the saved reply and edit out the extra set of headers. -- Bob Larson Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu Uucp: {sdcrdcf,cit-vax}!oberon!skat!blarson blarson@skat.usc.edu Prime mailing list (requests): info-prime-request%fns1@ecla.usc.edu
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (12/03/87)
In article <635@brandx.rutgers.edu> webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes: >Instead of putting in such a negative feature, it would be better to >work toward making it easier to for people to postpone their >followups. Doubtless some news reader already has this feature, but >unless a feature is put in most of the news readers, it will tend to >miss alot of people. The most popular newsreader, "rn", already has this feature. It's the 'M' command. This command marks a message as unread. After you complete reading the newsgroup, the 'M'ed messages return. That's what I use; any message I'm considering following up to I mark as unread and get back to it later when I have time. -- - Joe Buck {uunet,ucbvax,sun,decwrl,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck Old internet mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net
lwv@n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) (12/05/87)
What I would like to see in rn (besides the bugs that I deal with and the other neat features and the fact that I have not heard 'hide nor hair' :-) of Larry Wall since his baby was born last spring) is two new features for helping followup: 1. I would like something similar to = which shows only those items with the same subject. 1b. (So I forgot that I had more than 2) Have rn sort out articles which are referenced into some sort of timeline so that IF there are multiple related 'threads', we see them in a closer to posting sequence. 2. The ability to create a followup or reply, but have it pended until the group has been finished. Then the user would at that time get a last chance to go thru the articles and decide whether to really post / mail them or not. 2b. This would resolve one of the annoying features of rn that I see - if I have a large kill file (which happens more and more often in some groups ;-0) and I post a message, I have to wait until all of the kills are attempted on my posting before I get a chance to be presented with the original article again for disposition. And sometimes I get my article to dispose of first! If all of my articles were pended, then I could , if I so wished, perform a cleanup or global junking of my own postings. I suppose I could do that already in the kill file, but I just thought of that and I STILL have to wait until the entire kill file is processed. - which of course could lead me on into more proposed changes, but this is not the time or place - a msg to larry wall, if I could find the address, would suffice for that. Or perhaps to whoever is now keeper of the rn changes. -- Larry W. Virden 75046,606 (CIS) 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068 (614) 864-8817 cbosgd!n8emr!lwv (UUCP) cbosgd!n8emr!lwv@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (BITNET) We haven't inherited the world from our parents, but borrowed it from our children.