kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) (08/14/89)
Brad Templeton writes: > I think that this [digest bursting] is a bell & whistle that really > doesn't belong in the reader. The breaking up of digests should > really be done at the gateway, or by the inews program. Indeed. Why do digests appear at all on USENET? There are good reasons for using them with mailing lists, but none of them seem to apply to USENET.
bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (08/14/89)
In article <1989Aug14.140248.12480@talos.uucp> kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) writes:
Why do digests appear at all on USENET? There are good reasons for
using them with mailing lists, but none of them seem to apply to
USENET.
Many newsgroups began life as mailing lists. Larger and more
successful mailing lists are often moderated and digestified, to
increase S/N and decrease the number of individual messages generating
bounce-o-grams coming back to the list maintainer. When such lists
are gatewayed, it is often to a moderated newsgroup and in a
digestified form.
Some more enlightened list moderators/digestifiers (e.g. wnl of
Sun-Spots fame) have agreed to set things up so that the newsgroup
side sees individual articles, while the mailing list side still sees
the digests. This is somewhat difficult to do the first time, but
once the tee is in place it flows smoothly enough. Thenceforth, both
the list-based people and the newsgroup-based people are happy because
they get the same information in a form that is convenient to them.
Some older mailing list maintainers are crufty old ARPAnauts who see
no particular benefit to this news stuff, or don't have the time to
devote to a complete reworking of how their still-successful mailing
list procedures function. This is their prerogative, and if we want
to read their lists we simply must adapt. Most such lists are at the
top of the S/N, reading quality, and usefulness scales, and I for one
am happy to have the opportunity to read them at all, let alone in
news. The list maintainers didn't have to agree to the gateway in the
first place, after all.
That's why news reading user agents often have special functions for
handling digests more conveniently: historical precedent and intertia.