tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (05/21/89)
In article <2895@cayman.COM> chris@cayman.COM (Chris North, Technical Support) writes: > I was under the same impression as you and my posting was only in >response to a number of requests asking for our address. If the conscensus >is that this announcement was inappropriate, then I apologize and I will >certainly not let it happen again. I don't know that there is a net consensus. There was one about six or seven years ago, and I haven't heard of a turnabout, but it may have drifted to the other side by now. I am redirecting discussion to news.misc to determine whether there is now a consensus against paying for other's commercial technical support e-mail. To summarize for news.misc readers: A company has stated its intent to provide technical support over the network. The last time I heard this discussed, there was a very strong consensus against it; this was with respect to Wollongong making a similar announcement in the early 1980's. Many people expressed the unwillingness to pay for forwarding these commercial messages. In the light on the greatly increased traffic, this may have changed, and I solicit comments from system administrators in particular. I personally think e-mail support is a good idea, and I feel the earlier reluctance may have had more to do with a lack of respect for the quality of Wollongong's products than with a general policy. In any case, this matter needs to be clarified. > I think one point to note however is that the net would not be paying >for my company's tech support. The person who is benefitting >is the person who would have been making the long distance phone call to me. Yes, people would be paying to forward support messages to you, and no doubt from you as well. This was what people objected to before. -- Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim "Every institution I've ever been associated with has tried to screw me." -- Stephen Wolfram
brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (05/21/89)
There are many companies performing tech support over the various nets. SCO is one of the most obvious examples, and a well liked one, I think. There never has been any sort of concensus against commercial use of the net in any of its forms. Quite the opposite, it's all over the place. Consider the top ten groups: 1 65000 rec.humor.funny - Evil capitalist group :-) 2 58000 news.announce.conferences - you pay to put these in CACM 3 57000 news.announce.important 4 51000 alt.sex 5 50000 comp.sys.ibm.pc - half the postings are requests for information people need in their work. 6 49000 misc.jobs.offered - Help wanted ads are a big industry 7 45000 comp.sources.unix 8 43000 news.announce.newusers 9 41000 comp.sys.mac - lots of messages for commercial benefit 10 40000 misc.forsale - how much more commercial can you get? This answers the question well. Almost all of us regularly use the net, either overtly or quietly, for our commercial purposes. If there has been any concensus, it's "No commercial ABuse," not "No commercial use." If it benefits the other folks on the net, and not just you, then it's ok. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) (05/22/89)
In the case of product tech support via netmail, we should defer to
the anarchy of the net rather than try to impose rules. If I am a leaf
site who happens to use XYZroff and I mail one question to the vendor
every couple of months, my feed sites would have to be insane tyrants
to care. If on the other hand I am XYZroff Corp. and am receiving and
answering twenty requests per day, then *my* mail feed site had better
be feeling generous -- or be compensated for its trouble. And so on up
to the "backbone" at which point the traffic scatters.
Unless Rick objects, a simple solution would be to "request" that any
commercial operation wanting to use the net for tech support subscribe
to UUNET directly. That way you're paying the most oppressed part for
his services, and dealing straight from the "backbone" net-wide.
--
Tom Neff UUCP: ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
"Truisms aren't everything." Internet: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NETbob@monster.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (05/22/89)
If a company wants to provide mail access to itself, it should become a UUNET subscriber so that they are paying the bill for the largest flow choke point. If it wants to provide absolutely secure, absolutely reliable mail access to itself (as "absolutely" as you can get :-), and to throw in file transfers for maintenance and updates as well, it should set up direct UUCP links with its customers. We've done this with a vendor because they needed to be able to get kernel cores from our system and give us new kernel object modules, by dialing us from California. It was very useful. If a vendor wants to provide an electronic customer support forum, they should get themselves (and their customers) a "biz.all" feed and establish their own newsgroup there. That's why the "biz" distribution arose. Again, if they want to be as assured as possible that the flow of biz.all news is reliable, they should establish a direct feed with each customer for just this distribution (or perhaps even just their own group in that distribution). It's anarchistic capitalism at its best: You want it, you pay for it.
lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) (05/23/89)
In article <7382@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >To summarize for news.misc readers: A company has stated its intent to >provide technical support over the network. The last time I heard this >discussed, there was a very strong consensus against it; this was with >respect to Wollongong making a similar announcement in the early >1980's. Many people expressed the unwillingness to pay for forwarding >these commercial messages. In the light on the greatly increased >traffic, this may have changed, and I solicit comments from system >administrators in particular. I personally think e-mail support is a >good idea, and I feel the earlier reluctance may have had more to do >with a lack of respect for the quality of Wollongong's products than >with a general policy. In any case, this matter needs to be clarified. The last time this made the rounds, a new top level distribution was creates: biz. It's purpose was to carry commercial traffic from vendors, be it advertising, product support, whatever. Only sites explicitly requesting a particular subset of biz would receive the postings. One solution would be to create biz.comp.caymen. This group could be sent to those customer sites wanting to exchange product support information. Customer sites could get it "direct from the source" or make arrangements amongst themselves for distribution. As far as support via email is concerned, my feeling has always been that if you're only sending a couple of messages a week, don't worry about it, unless you're sending large files back and forth. Otherwise, set up a direct link with the other site. In our case, we maintain general email links with alberta, decwrl, and ncc. However we also have direct links with attcan, attvcr, cedm01, lsuc, and sq for support related mail. Given the volume of mail we exchange with the latter group of sites (not much) I don't think any of our mainstream feeds would complain about us routing through them instead, however there is another overriding reason we went with direct links to our vendors: security. In many cases, we are exchanging proprietary information with them that would be much too vulnerable to outside scrutiny if we routed through "third party" nodes. Many people will argue that it's too expensive to set up a direct mail link with a vendor who may be located across the country somwhere. I disagree with this. If you consider the amount of time you spend making a voice call (going through switchboards, listening to elevator music, explaining the problem, etc) vs the amount of time it takes to transmit an electronic document describing your problem, you'll find your phone bills will be less if you concentrate on using email. Of course this argument presumes you have trained your vendor to respond as quickly to email as to voice calls.-- Lyndon Nerenberg / Computing Services / Athabasca University {alberta,decwrl,ncc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA