gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP (05/30/87)
In article <706@hao.UCAR.EDU> woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods) writes: ->In article <2732@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: ->> As I side note, I'm a bit peeved that I had to change all my "> "s ->>to "-> "s to make inews happy. I really think this was a mis-feature. -> And I'm peeved that you made OUR SITE pay to RE-transmit an article that ->all the math people have ALREADY READ. Do you think they are stupid? So, you then send to the math newsgroup despite Roy's explicit request to follow-up to new.software.b. ->Is it *really* necessary to quote 20 lines of old article to make a two-line ->comment on it? I do not. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I prefer to include enough to refresh everyone's memory about what I'm responding to, or to save having to essentially restate the question for clarity (as in this case). -> You may be right in saying that having inews enforce a old/new text ratio ->is the wrong way to go about it, but we have to do SOMETHING to stop the ->excessive quoting of old articles. As always, the news software writers ->(read: Rick Adams) are always open to suggestions on how to do it better; ->without these, complaints are nothing more than yet more useless flames. Better to do something wrong than to not do something, huh? The old/new text ratio test is so patently BOGUS (and also incorrectly implemented) that it should never have been installed in the first place. It has emphatically NOT stopped the excessive quoting of old articles. How the hell is dumb software supposed to decide what is or is not excessive? I tell you, it cannot be done. So cut it out. It's just causing aggravation and wasting valuable people time.
aburt@isis.UUCP (06/03/87)
I agree the new/old ratio of text is not the best approach to prevent
over-inclusion of old articles. I further agree with Roy that diff'ing the
old vs. new would not be accurate enough. For any method that we could
think of people would think of simple work arounds: Diffing the tail of
the line could easily be defeated by adding a | to the ends of lines; a
more sophisticated effort might cause people to replace all spaces with _'s.
So how about this. When someone replies and requests inclusion of the
old article (e.g., 'F' in rn, but not 'f') they are told that if they don't
make the new/old ratio high (above 1) then they risk the flaming wrath of
thousands of net readers followed by a yes/no question, "Do you understand
this?". That is, educate the user on the spot, not via a newusers
article read long ago or not at all. All that would be needed are the
addition of yes/no prompts to rn/readnews/etc.
Locally I have found even a mild threat of flaming has kept even very
flamboyant personalities from posting. This wasn't the intended effect
but it demonstrates that fear of flaming is a powerful weapon.
--
Andrew Burt isis!aburt
Fight Denver's pollution: Don't Breathe and Drive.kre@munnari.UUCP (06/05/87)
In article <1852@isis.UUCP>, aburt@isis.UUCP (Andrew Burt) writes: | I agree the new/old ratio of text is not the best approach to prevent | over-inclusion of old articles. A "best" method is most likely never going to appear. | For any method that we could | think of people would think of simple work arounds: That's not a bug, its a feature. The pity is that most people think of the most obvious, and stupid, workaround .. adding junk lines. The right way to avoid the limit is to change the '>' to some other character (like '|' or '<' or '[' -- whatever your personality dictates). Doing that means that you have at least deliberately decided that the amount of text quoted is the amount that you have wanted to quote, there's been at least some thought. That's the aim, to make people think. There's no point being overly intrusive, there's absolutely nothing that can be done that can't be defeated. kre
john@frog.UUCP (John Woods, Software) (06/10/87)
> | I agree the new/old ratio of text is not the best approach to prevent > | over-inclusion of old articles....For any method that we could > | think of people would think of simple work arounds: > > That's not a bug, its a feature. The pity is that most people > think of the most obvious, and stupid, workaround .. adding > junk lines. > > The right way to avoid the limit is to change the '>' to some > other character (like '|' or '<' or '[' -- whatever your personality > dictates). > Well, the workaround that I found was to edit inews to announce that such a message is in poor taste, instead of refusing it outright. But then I've always prefered the gentle-reminder approach to the bludgeon... -- John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1101 ...!decvax!frog!john, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw%mit-ccc@MIT-XX.ARPA FRIVOLITY is a stern Ts) are m10 in