brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (03/09/85)
Of course the natural instinct is to put in all sorts of features that will make posting easier. That's how things like Re: lines and automatic text inclusion got added. Or automatic creation of new groups when any novice typed in an unrecognized name. Or "orphaned response", or "news from mail" or a dozen other features. The point is that my experience shows you that any such feature in a news system will be massively abused. There is a .signature feature. It's used to post quotes, little pictures and people's postal addresses. Easily tens of thousands of dollars of phone bills have now been spent on sending those little pictures. There is an ORGANIZATION feature to clear up the problem in figuring out where a person is from a cryptic site name. People use it so they can be cute at the top instead of at the bottom. Even the keywords line that was reserved for future use by K news has just become an extra subject line - not that an extra subject line is bad. Every feature is misused. Before you advocate a feature, apply Murphy's law. Pretend people will be trying to openly subvert it, it will seem that way. News is for the readers right now. Of course no poster will agree with this because they are a poster. But I'm talking about the vast majority who do read, and the even greater number of people who looked at the net briefly and said "what a volume of trash." You all know lots of people like that. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473