zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle) (05/08/91)
** Followups to news.groups ** In article <1991May7.192731.5241@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > [ assorted praises of comp.sys.amiga.advocacy in getting a lot of ] > [ junk out of the other comp.sys.amiga.* groups ] Absolutely. Of the various new groups created in the comp.sys.amiga re-organization, this one was one of the most useful. Before this newsgroup was created, there were a whole lot of posts from people saying why the Amiga was so much worse/better than some other computer. Well, it bothered me. For better or worse, I have an Amiga, and I can't toss it aside and buy another computer. I want posts that will tell me how to make it more useful, instead of telling me how dumb/stupid I was to spend all that money on one. All of those comparison posts were simply not useful to me or any of the people who already own a computer (which includes most of the readers of comp.sys.*). After the .advocacy group was created, a lot of this moved out of the groups in which I am interested. I think there was only one persistent thread, which compared the Mac to the Amiga. This eventually went away. It was nice seeing all of the followups to .advocacy at the end of the thread. Right now, there are *none* of these threads in the groups I read. It is indeed a pleasure. In fact, if one of these threads does crop up in one of the groups I read, it's reassuring to know that I (and lots of other netters) can tell the errant posters to simply "...take it to .advocacy." On the other hand, those people who do like to read and write about these things now have an opportunity to do so. I usually see well over 200 unexpired posts in that group. People who want to talk about those sorts of things have an audience there. Mind you, I imagine that they have an audience that is rather likely to jump all over you if you post something, but.... The .amiga.advocacy group has been such a success, I would strongly suggest that the other personal computer areas that have a problem with certain posters comparing their machines with other ones create their own .advocacy groups. The areas where I think there are likely to be problems (I don't read, sorry) are comp.sys.next, comp.sys.mac, and comp.sys.atari.st. (Is a NeXT a personal computer or a workstation, anyway? It's marketed like a personal computer but it acts like a workstation....). Of course, you folks can keep struggling with your kill files if you want.... Dan Zerkle zerkle@iris.eecs.ucdavis.edu (916) 754-0240 Amiga... Because life is too short for boring computers.