reid@decwrl.DEC.COM (Brian Reid) (12/05/86)
(Note to readers of net.cooks: there is a question for you at the end of this
article)
(Note to readers outside North America: what this fuss is all about is that a
couple of weeks ago I started posting duplicate copies of the recipes as
plain text files rather than as troff files. They have a distribution code
such that they do not get outside North America)
I've gotten about 200 mail messages expressing opinions about the cleartext
recipes. This is, by far, the most controversial issue in the history of
mod.recipes. The responses go something like this:
Cate-
gory Count Position
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A. 15 Keep the cleartext recipes and discard the other format.
B. 50 The cleartext recipes are wonderful. Good work.
C. 50 the cleartext recipes don't bother me and I don't look at them
D. 50 I don't mind the cleartext recipes but...
D1 15 please put them all first, instead of the current scheme
D2 15 please put them all last, instead of the current scheme
D3 15 please post them all to net.cooks instead of mod.recipes
D4 5 please do (various random thing) with them instead.
E. 30 I don't like the cleartext recipes at all and I really wish you
would stop posting them (typical reasons: too much disk space,
too much of a nuisance to skip over, violates intellectual
purity of the universe, etc.)
F. 2 I don't like the cleartext recipes at all, and I think you are
a disgusting piece of slime for posting them.
This whole discussion was started when I forwarded an incoherent note last
week from somebody who complained about the cleartext recipes. Two people
translated that note into English for me, and after I read the translation, I
put that person's comment into category E above. Of the two people in
category F, one was my brother and he has always called me names since I was
a litle boy; the other is clearly deranged or else accidentally tried to eat
some of the soap recipe, and I will ignore him.
One person (whose letter came in category D4) made a suggestion that I like,
namely to put the cleartext at the beginning of each recipe. He correctly
noted that the recipe software would strip off the cleartext recipe as it was
stripping off the news header. Unfortunately, if I did this, the distribution
to Europe and Australia and Japan would get all fouled up, for various deep
technical reasons having to do with the way the news transport mechanism
works. The problem is that the selection of whether or not to send material
over the expensive trans-oceanic links is made on an article-by-article
basis, and I can't post to the overseas distributions unless my machine is
part of those distributions, which it isn't.
Therefore I would like to find out what people think about D3, namely posting
the cleartext recipes to net.cooks instead of to mod.recipes. This would
solve a few problems but it would also create a few problems, such as
increasing the clutter in net.cooks (which is why I am crossposting this to
net.cooks)
--
Brian Reid
DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto CA
reid@decwrl.DEC.COM -or- {ihnp4,ucbvax,decvax,sun,pyramid}!decwrl!reid