ka (02/22/83)
A lot of the problems Perry mentions are inherent to USENET. I think that asking for assistance over USENET is reasonable (although I agree that it can be overdone). New people keep on getting added to USENET at quite a fast rate, so that a topic which was beaten into the ground 6 months ago will be new to a large number of people now. Finally, one of the advantages of USENET is that anyone who wants to can post to USENET; but of course this lack of a moderator means that no quality standards can be enforced. I do think that we should make more use of summaries. Generally, a person who asks a question on the net should be expected to collect responses by mail and post the results after stripping obvious duplicates. Kenneth Almquist