mike.rice%rand-relay@sri-unix.UUCP (06/13/83)
From: Mike.Caplinger <mike.rice@rand-relay> I hope I'm not be short-sighted or elitist here, but recent Unix-wizards traffic has convinced me that this newsgroup, like so many others, follows Sturgeon's Law; 90% of it is garbage. Do we really need an extended discussion of whether osh means "old shell" or not, and whether this is a good convention? Do we really need to discuss the relative merits of RAW and CBREAK mode? I use this group as a forum to ask difficult questions about bugs in Unix systems; as a means to track down obscure programs and drivers; and as a way to propagate the knowledge we gain at Rice running about 10 diverse Unix and emulated-Unix systems. I have a hard time doing this when a large fraction of the messages are basically fluff, some of it irrelevant, and a disturbing portion just plain wrong. The newsgroups I've been most impressed with, such as WorkStations and TCP/IP, are edited groups. The editor is held responsible for weeding out the obvious trash, and arranging the remaining messages in some reasonable way. This is a tough job; I couldn't do it even if Rice were an Arpanet site, and able to handle the traffic. (Please note that this is in no way intended to be derisive of the people currently in charge or anyone on the group; I've certainly contributed my share of garbage over the years.) But we really need to do something. If people can't handle this job, perhaps some form of "intelligent reflector" could. Does anybody have any relevant ideas on this? Mike Caplinger Dept. of Math Sciences Rice University (mike.rice@rand-relay)
FIGMO%kestrel@sri-unix.UUCP (06/15/83)
From: Lynn Gold <FIGMO@kestrel> Sounds like a good idea to me! I normally go into MM (btw, is there a Unix version of MM?) and say MM>del, M>uns M>tex unix-wizards I then look at the headers of the deleted messages to see if anything strikes me as interesting/relevant; if so, I undelete the interesting messages and expunge the rest from my mail file. I don't like my mail getting filled up with garbage, ESPECIALLY when my system is short on free disk space. I think I've flamed enough for now. --Lynn -------