[news.misc] Postive vs Negative Features

blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) (12/03/87)

In article <635@brandx.rutgers.edu> webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes:

[Some sugestions I agree with.  He has several good ideas that I edited
out because I didn't have anything to add.]

>Instead of putting in such a negative feature, it would be better to
>work toward making it easier to for people to postpone their
>followups.

>Doubtless some news reader already has this feature, but
>unless a feature is put in most of the news readers, it will tend to
>miss alot of people.  The biggest thing preventing delayed followups
>is the annoyance of tracking down the messages you want to follow up
>to.

I use the M feature of rn for this.  Cross-posted articles are the
main problem with this tecnique.

>Or a feature that lets you stop in mid-reply and continue the reply
>later 

I do this by writing the reply I am editing to a file and abort, then
later using Pnews including the saved reply and edit out the extra set
of headers.
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webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) (12/11/87)

In article <5499@oberon.USC.EDU>, blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) writes:
> In article <635@brandx.rutgers.edu> webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes:
> ....
> I use the M feature of rn for this.  Cross-posted articles are the
> main problem with this tecnique.

Your site expiring the article will also take some of the usefulness
out of the Mark.

> >Or a feature that lets you stop in mid-reply and continue the reply
> >later 
> 
> I do this by writing the reply I am editing to a file and abort, then
> later using Pnews including the saved reply and edit out the extra set
> of headers.

There is no question that with a little understanding of the system, a
person can do whatever they want.  Even raw inews works fairly well as
a news posting system (I regularly use it directly for local
announcements).  For that matter, it is rather easy to cons up a nice
customized news reader using awk and shell scripts if you are a
programmer.  However, the news software encourages a class of
readers/posters who have only a marginal understanding of any software
(be it unix, their editor, their mail program, or the news software
itself).  For them, I am afraid your usages of rn and Pnews are just
not a solution.

--- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)