randall@Virginia.EDU (Randall Atkinson) (05/28/91)
In article <1991May27.194227.23528@demon.co.uk> cliff@demon.co.uk (Cliff Stanford) writes: >In article <1991May25.201843.12565@uwasa.fi> ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi) writes: >>Nevertheless, I would strongly advise against posting binaries to >>unmoderated groups. On top of that I seem to recall that the net >>rules don't like it (news.announce.newusers has more information), >>let's look at this from a purely practical point of view. > > The posting in question was a compressed text file. IMHO compressing >and uuencoding a lage text file is a far better idea that posting it in >its raw text format. How you think it can increase net traffic (one of >the points you made) I fail to comprehend. Now ZIP is available on so >many platforms, I feel that more large text files sould be zipped before >sending out on the net. It is true that compression should be used. It is also true that a file of that size that has been compressed to a binary form and then uuencoded should not according to long-standing USENET practice and the posted guidelines (in news.announce.newusers) be posted except to a moderated "binaries" newsgroup. The reason for this is that many, many of the links forming the net are still over low bandwidth modems and news administrators on the unfortunate side of such links need to be able to restrict the flow of large "binary-type" (including large compressed text file) postings so that they don't lose their entire network feeds. Such news admins aren't technically able to sort manually for such files in their newsfeed but can easily sort by newsgroup using existing mechanisms. Such "binary" newsgroups are often simply not carried across the low bandwidth links and if a pattern of binary postings to a discussion group appears, many sites will stop carrying the nominally discussion-only newsgroup and many innocent folks will lose part of their net access. It is important for all of us to try to be considerate of others in this regard. The comp.binaries .ibm.pc newsgroup has in the past carried text-only compressed files and is probably where that posting should have been made (if at all). Ideally I think that such files would be made available via "anonymous ftp" or "anonymous UUCP" or such like instead, but if posted they should only go to a moderated binaries newsgroup. By the way, nowhere does it say that a "binary" is by definition executable or object code, it just means any encoding that isn't a pure text encoding (along the lines of US ASCII or maybe ISO 646). Please re-read the periodic postings in news.announce.newusers in this regard.
csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) (05/30/91)
>>The posting in question was a compressed text file. IMHO compressing and >>uuencoding a lage text file is a far better idea that posting it in its >>raw text format. You are wrong. Any news link where compression is helpful is already using compression in the news software. Compressing an article that is was already compressed by the originator makes it larger. Anything posted to the net should be in "raw" uncompressed format. Always. That includes binaries. <csg>