jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (07/25/85)
I have a suggestion for reducing the level of cross-postings between
newsgroups. Forgive me if this has been suggested already; I have had
to reduce my reading to 2 or 3 groups recently, since the time required
is rapidly expanding.
My suggestion is that "postnews" and other programs for posting comments
not continue their current policy of ENCOURAGING multiple postings. This
is largely a human factors matter, but postnews, for instance, continues
to prompt for additional newsgroups until you enter a blank line. Even
the most naive user is thus provided with considerable prompting to select
more than one newsgroup, as well as being made aware of the fact that he
can do so in the first place.
It would work much better if these programs made it HARD to post to
multiple newsgroups. For example, postnews might require a "continuation
character" in order to enter on more than one line, with newsgroups
separated by commas.
In the same way, "followup" might "prune" the list of newsgroups so that by
default it posts only to the group in which the reader read the comment
originally (since he is likely to be thinking of interpersonal
relationships, and not politics, for example, if he is in net.singles and
reads an article on "Women's Rights", whereas in net.politics he might be
thinking of the ERA). The user could still cross-post by adding newsgroups
in the followup.
--
Shyy-Anzr: J. Eric Roskos
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