dan@dsi.COM (Dan Mick) (10/21/89)
Okay, so I've been reading news for a month or so, and nine times out of ten, the message has 20 lines of quotation, 10 lines of signature (or more), and 2 lines of new information. *MEGA-FLAME LIGHTING NOW...* Why the h*** is this permitted? Isn't the whole point of netnews to be ever cognizant of your information bandwidth? Over-quotation is *specifically* warned against and rn tries to prevent it (or Pnews, whichever), but I read lots of messages every day that pull back all sorts of stuff that's not useful at all to the discussion at hand... And are .sig files a total waste or what? I don't want to see your misspellings of names, misquotations of respectable authors and humorists, your dog's boarding kennel phone number, and what *you* consider to be witty, along with five thousand different ways to reach you on the net...dammit, I've got a Reply-To line already, and an organization, and if you can't reach me that way, you can use a phone book! It's just amazing to me that the net community goes to such great lengths to prohibit RTFM questions and "Me too" responses and even suggests policies like "don't post a followup, rather reply by mail and let the poster summarize", and then on the other hand, wastes so much space routinely with such utter crap as .sigs and quoting and ASCII pictures in .sigs, for God's sake!! It sure seems like hypocrisy. Then again, I never see much of the above from Doug Gwyn or Spaf or Chuq or any of those who publicly announce things about policy...so maybe there are just about 90% total idiots on the net?... No .sig file for me!
bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) (10/24/89)
In article <283@dsi.COM> dan@dsi.UUCP (Dan Mick) writes:
: Okay, so I've been reading news for a month or so, and nine times out of ten,
: the message has 20 lines of quotation, 10 lines of signature (or more), and
: 2 lines of new information.
:
: *MEGA-FLAME LIGHTING NOW...*
Please don't flame in news.newusers.questions. The new users will
find out about flames without our help, and flames are rarely
informational.
: Why the h*** is this permitted? Isn't the whole point of netnews to be ever
: cognizant of your information bandwidth?
It is permitted because there is no one to forbid it. There is no
central authority on the net.
: Over-quotation is *specifically* warned against and rn tries to prevent it (or
: Pnews, whichever), but I read lots of messages every day that pull back all
: sorts of stuff that's not useful at all to the discussion at hand...
No kidding. And my reply to you no doubt will contain more quoted
text than original text. Why do I, a not-so-new-user do this?
Becaue I want to make sure that there is continuity. It is very
easy to lose track of what is going on when an insufficient
amount of context is provided.
: And are .sig files a total waste or what?
No, .signature files are not a total waste. I have one, with my
name and e-mail address.
: I don't want to see your misspellings
: of names, misquotations of respectable authors and humorists, your dog's
: boarding kennel phone number, and what *you* consider to be witty,
One of the, so far unwritten, rules of netiquette: never comment,
except humorously or positively, on someone else's signature. Why?
Because the signature is a personal expression. You should no
more attack a person's signature than you should attack what he
sticks on his T-shirt.
If you've read a message all the way to the end, it should be
easy enough to skip a signature. Why worry about it?
: along with
: five thousand different ways to reach you on the net...dammit, I've got a
: Reply-To line already, and an organization, and if you can't reach me that
: way, you can use a phone book!
Well, maybe that's enough. And maybe not. As one who does a lot of
e-mail, let me say that I'm glad when people take the extra effort
to give me help in getting mail to them. Admittedly, sometimes
this effort is misguided, but a polite note suggesting an
improvement, as opposed to a flame, will likely get the route
information reduced to something reasonable.
: It's just amazing to me that the net community goes to such great lengths to
: prohibit RTFM questions and "Me too" responses and even suggests policies like
: "don't post a followup, rather reply by mail and let the poster summarize",
: and then on the other hand, wastes so much space routinely with such utter
: crap as .sigs and quoting and ASCII pictures in .sigs, for God's sake!! It
: sure seems like hypocrisy.
But it is not. The purpose is *not* to save disk space. The
purpose is to save time for the reader scanning the newsgroup.
Disk space is, at best, a secondary consideration.
Those suggestioons are to cut down on the *number* of messages,
with the desire that readers of the newsgroups will have fewer
messages to spend time ignoring.
---
Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.comdavidbe@sco.COM (The Cat in the Hat) (10/25/89)
news.newusers.questions's own dan@dsi.UUCP (Dan Mick) said:
-Okay, so I've been reading news for a month or so, and nine times out of ten,
-the message has 20 lines of quotation, 10 lines of signature (or more), and
-2 lines of new information.
-
-Why the h*** is this permitted? Isn't the whole point of netnews to be ever
-cognizant of your information bandwidth?
It's permitted because there's no way to stop it. And, even so, it's not
encouraged; but there are no "net.police" to enforce such things.
But if you notice this much quoting, I'd have to wonder what newsgroups
you're reading.
-Over-quotation is *specifically* warned against and rn tries to prevent it (or
-Pnews, whichever), but I read lots of messages every day that pull back all
-sorts of stuff that's not useful at all to the discussion at hand...
Pnews tries to prevent the novice user from overquoting. The user who knows
to set their RNINIT variable isn't bound by this restriction. Most of the
time the "more new text than quoted material" rule is valid; there are times,
however when a simple, short answer is all that's needed.
-And are .sig files a total waste or what? [I don't want to see]
-what *you* consider to be witty, along with
-five thousand different ways to reach you on the net...dammit, I've got a
-Reply-To line already, and an organization, and if you can't reach me that
-way, you can use a phone book!
In your case, I can't. The .UUCP is not a generally valid domain, and I
have no idea who you talk to. From the path your article got to my sight
by, I could *guess* that you talk to uunet, but I can't be positive.
In addition, I use my .signature for a disclaimer; something that SCO requires
I have (because, yes, these are just my opinions).
-It's just amazing to me that the net community goes to such great lengths to
-prohibit RTFM questions and "Me too" responses and even suggests policies like
-"[ etc, etc ]" and then on the other hand, wastes so much space routinely with
-such utter crap as .sigs and quoting and ASCII pictures in .sigs
-
-Then again, I never see much of the above from Doug Gwyn or Spaf or Chuq or
-any of those who publicly announce things about policy...so maybe there are
-just about 90% total idiots on the net?...
Much of what of the above? Chuq has a 6 line .sig now, and normally has
a quote in his. For that matter, everyone willing to go to the line for
the net (and I'm not familiar with your name from any of the news.* groups)
seems to have a .signature (not all, I'm sure).
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with .signatures, as long as the
information in it is useful, and the quote is reasonably short. However,
anything over 8 lines, is excessive (IMHO [In My Humble Opinion]), and
ascii graphics are a waste of electrons. But, to each their own.
And if you include /etc/termcap as your .signature (as happened once) then
I reserve the right to contact your systems administrator. And if you feel
that a 7-line .signature is too long, you can feel free to contact my
(or anyone else's) boss. That's the way of the net.
[ A flame of this article may appear in alt.flame only. ]
--
David Bedno, Systems Administrator, The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Email: davidbe@sco.COM / ..!{uunet,sun,ucbvax!ucscc,gorn}!sco!davidbe
Phone: 408-425-7222 x5123 Disclaimer: Speaking from SCO but not for SCO.
"You know, it wouldn't be too bad for baseball if there were a small earthquake
and Candlestick Park were to just drop into the bay." - me, an hour before the
Oct 17 earthquaketronix@polari.UUCP (David Daniel) (02/08/90)
In article <2071@castle.ed.ac.uk> own@castle.ed.ac.uk (O Morgan) writes: >Hi, >could someone tell me what the correct format of a .signature file is. >Whenever I post a message I get told that the signature has been left >out because it " .. must be readable by inews". >What's inews? > >Thanks >Olly I ran into the same problem. As I understand it, inews is a daemon that among other things, accesses your directory to read the .signature file and append it to your article. If your .signature file isn't readable by inews it's because you have your directory restricted with the chmod command. I solved this by doing a chmod 711 (read only) for my home dir. I then locked off my sub dirs with the chmod go-rwx cmd. This arrangement allows me security and the ability to use a .sig. -- --- "What's so funny 'bout peace, love & understanding?" Elvis Costello ---
dmcgrego@cs.strath.ac.uk (D. James McGregor) (02/23/90)
OK, this has been annoying me for ages now. I have constructed a nice .signature file with read, write and (for good measure) execute access. My root directory is readable by the entire world, and STILL THE STUPID .inews FILE REFUSES TO ADMIT THAT IT CAN READ IT!!! WHY??!! I am at my wits end trying to figure out what the hell else needs read access so my .signature file gets read and appended to my news articles. I am, in fact, going mad. So can anyone please help? Best wishes, and thanks in advance, J.
akf@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jay Hinkelman) (02/27/90)
In article <2095@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> dmcgrego@cs.strath.ac.uk (D. James McGregor) writes: >OK, this has been annoying me for ages now. I have constructed a nice >.signature file with read, write and (for good measure) execute access. >My root directory is readable by the entire world, and STILL THE STUPID >.inews FILE REFUSES TO ADMIT THAT IT CAN READ IT!!! You need to set your .signature file to be world readable and your root directory to be world EXECUTABLE and readable. You do NOT need to make your .signature world writable or executable, and in fact should change that REAL fast before someone fiddles with it. -- Jay Hinkelman, akf@mentor.cc.purdue.edu "Catch ya later, Bill and Ted!" -- Bill and Ted
merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) (07/26/90)
In article <12443@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, akf@mentor (Jay Hinkelman) writes: | drwxr-xr-x [other stuff] ./ | | You can achieve this by typing "chmod gu+x ~/." This allows anyone | else, including the news program, to see the contents of your home | directory. That should be chmod go=r-w $HOME for all shells. (This is a pretty handy combination to remember, by the way.) Your's might have turned on the x bits without the r bits, and wouldn't have done anything for "other", which is probably what the newsposter-program was considered as. In Perl, of course, it'd be: #!/usr/bin/perl $h = $ENV{"HOME"}; $usermode = ((stat($h))[2]&0700) >> 6; $nonwritemode = $usermode &~ 2; chmod +(($usermode<<6)|($nonwritemode<<3)|($nonwritemode)), $h; which goes to show ya that not everything is easier in Perl. :-) Just another UNIX and Perl hacker, -- /=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\ | on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III | | merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn | \=Cute Quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon, home of the California Raisins!"=/