neitzel@tubsibr.uucp (Martin Neitzel) (09/13/89)
Could both sides calm down somewhat? And stop making personal insults? Good. Thank you. Articles on Usenet are written by humans. It takes two things to make the reading of these articles worthwhile: * Articles, well written and with some real contents. * The technical medium, software, and standards to transfer the articles to the audience and enable it to read some of the stuff. An author must be ``sensible'' when (s)he writes the article. Failing that, no techniques will ever transform a bogus submission into a pleasing contribution. There are some established conventions for the composition of an article, and there are often mechanical tools that ease adherence to these conventions. Example: By tradition and convention, cited material is usually marked with a ">" prefix at the left margin. A fine thing. Tools exist to automate this simple task. Fine. The point is, one should still be sensible when one applies these tools. I guess we all have seen enough messages were mutually citations were nested up to six levels and marked from ">>>" to ">>>>>". Those articles are certainly conforming to all standards and RFCs, but nevertheless I don't like to read them. Their authors don't seem to care about readable form. There are people out there who care. Take a look at Mark D. Baushke's article. The one with named citations (marked with "rsk>" and "peter>"). He developed a new convention and perhaps the tools for it. He cares about his articles and his readers. Back to the RFC and "Re^n:". Maybe Kim Storm had a new idea when came up with the "Re^n" header. It was "too new" to coexist with current practice and eventually he took it back. But he definitely cared about something. The utmost annoying thing in the recent flame festival was that someone was flamed because he cared about good news software. You may not agree with his Re^n-technique (I didn't), but many people seem totally to ignore that he had good intentions. The phrasing "bogus subject line" clearly too derogative against Kim F. Storm in my view. It drives me crazy when people get attacked only because they care about Usenet software and conventions and think of alternatives (Brad Templeton comes to mind, of course). Please keep the automated article bouncer from the posting that started this awful series of articles. But modify it so that it jumps at authors of articles with ">>>>>" quotes or lines longer than 80 chars. The ones that spread misinformation. The ones which can't recognize sarcasm without lots of smileys. The ones with a "Re: " subject line that is conforming, but doesn't match the contents of the article anymore. Shoot if you really must, but shoot the Bad Guys first. Martin