gnu (12/16/82)
One of the possible vote options (besides y, n, don't care, etc) should of course be f -- flame. This would be especially useful for generating automatic flaming (mailed) replies to messages that didn't even request a vote. If it only took one keystroke to send to him, rabbit!jj would spend all his time reading flames and have less time to post long messages. This reminds me of a comment made by decvax!aps the other day. He wanted to see a new command in readnews, "nuke", which acts like "u" except it operates on the sender of the message rather than on the receiver. But seriously folks... John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems
sjb (12/16/82)
Automatic flaming back at authors was proposed a while ago, but I hoped it had been forgotten (after some discussion on the subject with Mark) It is simply terrible. The whole point of being able to reply is to do so CONSTRUCTIVELY and to THINK about what you're saying! To just send a form letter back is down right cretinous; it will put an extra burden on the net, since so many people will do it, and no one will THINK (God forbid!) about what they say! Talk about letting computers do things for you...