rcd@ico.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (08/07/87)
I wish that the discussion of expiration could have been carried out with
an initial understanding that any facility can be abused, but that it might
pay to study the intelligent uses as well.
The newsgroup rec.music.gdead, which is currently running an obnoxiously
high amount of traffic, could benefit considerably if it were possible to
post articles with long expiration and have them stay put. A couple of
examples:
There's a periodic rash of questions about (a) how the band got its name
and (b) what the tour info hotline phone numbers are. The name question
comes up about once a month or two but it invariably spawns a dozen replies
of "here's how", "I heard this", "no, that's not quite right"... In spite
of all the conjecture, the name question has a single, concise answer
that's known to be correct. It could be posted ONCE. The hotline-number
questions come up more frequently, though they generate less response
traffic. Anyway, if we could post a couple of short articles with almost
unlimited retention, we'd save a lot of traffic, storage, and nuisance.
The group also had a discussion which led to "NetHead" t-shirts. Although
the people doing the shirts made reasonable attempts to push all the
traffic into mail, there was a lot of confusion which generated traffic.
(No small part of the news traffic was due to the generally decrepit state
of uucp mail--with posting after posting beginning "Sorry for posting; I
tried to mail this but it bounced"--but I digress...) Why couldn't we
have had long-duration postings to save the T-shirt availability/ordering
information instead of repeating it, to everyone's annoyance?
Concert information could be posted with a reasonable expiration date tied
to the date of the concert--you don't need to know how much the tickets
cost after the show is over. For any given system and concert, this might
lead to an article lifetime either shorter or longer than the default.
Clear yet? Why don't we figure out how best to make use of a facility
which (a) was obviously put there for a reason and (b) has some obvious
uses, instead of focusing on how it has been, or might have been, or might
be, misused?
--
Dick Dunn {hao,nbires,cbosgd}!ico!rcd (NOT CSNET!) (303)449-2870
...Keep your day job 'til your night job pays.