msb@dciem.UUCP (Mark Brader) (08/08/86)
Net.aviation, hitherto a rather calm and well-ordered group, has recently been subject to a flaming war between the Usenet and Arpanet sides. One article that was not a flame was written by Henry Spencer, and I thought it was worth reposting to this group. END of text by Mark Brader. Unincluded text below is by Henry Spencer, and included text by someone else. > I have noticed a major difference in form between ARPA and USEnet > mailings, namely that posters from the latter very often quote in > large chunks of the message they're responding to... This is largely a consequence of the long-delay nature of Usenet, which means that the original message doesn't necessarily reach everyone before the response. It's also easier to follow a discussion in a busy network with a lot of other traffic if the responder does a bit of memory-jogging. Mind you, it is often carried unnecessarily far. Responsible posters try to minimize the volume of old material. Not everyone is responsible, alas. > ... To make things worse > still, USEnet postings often have quasi--humorous header lines (offer- > ings to a long-dead line-eating bug)... The line-eater bug unfortunately is *not* dead, although it is largely under control these days. Many people have distorted ideas of its nature and how to avoid it, which accounts for much of the silliness. (All that is really necessary is that the first line of the message body not start with white space, e.g. don't indent the first line of the paragraph.) > ... baroque headers giving the history, posting numbers, even software ver- > sion numbers of intervening forwarding hosts for every message... Let us give credit where it is due: much of that nonsense came straight from the Arpanet culture, and many of us on Usenet have always thought it was a damn stupid idea. If for no other reason, because we pay phone bills for every byte of it. At least one new version of the Usenet software with drastically-reduced headers is imminent. You might check out the number and bulk of things like "Received:" lines in the headers of Arpa-Internet mail messages before you flame us over this. > They even include the instruction lines telling them not to include those > instruction lines (**REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE**)... This is simply carelessness by novices, and somewhat ill-designed software. In a community as large as Usenet, there are a lot of novices, and fixes to human-interface mistakes aren't easy to propagate. > As a result, messages from USEnet have a much higher ratio of tail to > teeth than what we're used to... Are you sure you aren't injecting just a bit of anti-Usenet prejudice into this? Net.aviation, in particular, is not noted for gross sins in most of these respects. It seems to me that you are exaggerating the magnitude of the problem. > Note: If garbage accretes at the present rate, I expect the ARPAnet > community to desert in droves. Then I will have to choose between > re-closing the gateway and letting the ARPA end of it wither away. You pays your money and you takes your choice: a much wider audience with many more contributors, somewhat less discipline, and various problems arising from long-delay networks and different software... or a fairly homogeneous and well-run, but small, community. > Not that the target audience is expected to care. Actually, some of us do care, but one of the things we care about is that *you* should recognize that interfacing different communities running different software and having different traditions creates problems which are *not* solely the result of (most) everyone in the other community being a turkey. To take the easiest example, why is your software not stripping the silly headers in the same way it presumably strips your own "Received:" headers? If you continue to insist that it is *all* our fault, and we should be solely responsible for doing something about it, you will get little sympathy. > "You know, this used to be a hell of a fine network." > (Paraphrased from Jack Nicholson) "The Arpanet was the cradle of networking, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." (Paraphrased from Konstantin Tsiolkovskii) -- EDEC: Stupidly non-standard brain-damaged incompatible Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology proprietary protocol used. {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry