lauren@vortex.UUCP (07/05/83)
Greetings. Frankly, I fail to see the obvious connections between "greater than average" submission rates to the network and "network abuse" (is that anything like "self abuse"? Never mind...) As far as I'm concerned, it is the QUALITY of submissions that make messages either painful or interesting to read. If a person writes stupid or meaningless messages, even one a month is too much! On the other hand, there are some network authors from whom I wouldn't mind receiving two or three messages every day. Parden my towering immodesty, but over on ARPANET, where I've been active for over 13 years, I am well known as probably the single most active contributor to many of the large digests. During my entire career over there, I've never gotten a message telling me to "shut up -- you're sending too many messages". On the contrary, there have been cases where I was away from the network for a few days and came back to find my mailbox full of messages saying, "why haven't you commented? We want to know what you think about this... we actually pay attention to your comments". To me, such messages (which can make your whole day, by the way), indicate that sheer volume should not be sufficient to brand a person as a network "abuser". Mind you, I'm not saying anything one way or another about the people on the current "top-10" Usenet submitter list... just that I feel it would be unfair to simply make a "statistical" determination of abuse based solely on numbers of messages submitted, which seemed to be the idea suggested by the author of a recent article in this newsgroup. --Lauren--