rcj@burl.UUCP (R. Curtis Jackson) (10/21/83)
(a) The reason that there was such a furor over net.motss was NOT because we did not want System Administrators getting upset; it was because we did not want their BOSSES getting upset. You know, those guys who pay the phone bills for the net? Keep in mind that although a LOT of the stuff on the net is job-related, and I myself have used the resources of the many people on the net to solve many problems here at work, etc., etc., that a lot of the stuff on here is provided by the various companies and universities on the net as a perk to YOU. (b) This is particularly addressed to Mr. LaDew, but to the net in general: If you do not think that rotating jokes is necessary, please consider the situation at ABI Denver -- this is the story as I heard it: Because someone on druxi objected to a ROTATED joke (!!), which they took the time to unrot and read (obviously) first, net.jokes was taken off of druxi at least. I do not know if they also took it off the rest of the dr* systems. After that, the steering committee that originally considered netnews got back together and wiped almost EVERY non-directly-job-related newsgroup. If they are willing to do that over a rot13 joke, you can BET that there are people around who will do it over unrot stuff. Descriptive title lines are not only insufficient -- they are ill-advised. DO NOT put 'Dead Baby Joke (rot 13)' as your title if you can help it (not trying to pick on you, Mr. LaDew, just the last one I saw) -- say something like 'Gross Joke (rot 13)', or 'Very Offensive joke (rot 13)'. In case anyone is wondering why a descriptive title line is not good enough to warn someone to hit their 'n' key: it definitely is. Unfor- tunately, I know a lot of people who use the '-p' option on readnews to automatically read their news into a file and process it that way -- so go ahead and rot13 the stuff so they don't have to read it!! Thanks very much for your time, and flames/discussions/rotten-tomatoes are welcomed at the address below: -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3814 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ floyd clyde ihnp4 mhuxv ]!burl!rcj
darrell@drux3.UUCP (Darrell McIntosh) (10/21/83)
It's true that those of us in Denver lost about two thirds of our
newsgroups because of one joke. Unfortunately, the joke in question
was not rotated although it did state that it was offensive to a
certain minority group. Someone complained about the joke and
net.jokes was shortly removed from our systems. The remaining
newsgroups were taken from a list approved by our Computer Steering
Committee back in May. A proposal is being developed that will
hopefully get some of the newsgroups back; I'm sure that net.jokes is
forever gone.
When you submit articles to the net, please, please consider the
impact that they might have on other users of the net. One offensive
article can cause a lot of problems at some locations such as Denver.
--
Darrell McIntosh, AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver
(303) 538-3212, {ihnp4|hogpc}!drux3!darrell