As long as we are taliking about rmgrouping ...

[Roger L. Long]

In article <5771 at amdcad.UUCP> jimb at amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler) writes:
> Your restricted idea of what constitutes an idea demonstrates perfectly
> my point about the problem with moderated source groups.  Even
> a game source has been useful to me in gleaning a subroutine or function
> useful to me in my work.  I don't just take these sources and compile
> them, I find out how they work and I learn from the author's experience.

As the person who volunteered, please be assured that my idea of a
moderated sources group for the Macintosh would NOT mean censoring what
got posted AS LONG AS IT'S A SOURCE OR EXECUTABLE.  I intend to get rid
of multiple postings, posting of comments which belong in net.micro.mac,
and other "noise".

> I have a much simpler answer to most of the problems.  Eliminate the
> 'followup' capability from news software.  I'm sure this could be
> done at backbone sites by some inteligent gleaning of headers, and 
> perhaps some effort at local sites to remove the commands from the
> various news reading software.  I know this won't guarantee anything, but
> given human nature, the extra work needed to exit the news software, edit
> a captured article, and post it will reduce traffic significantly.

Come on...  you commented in the beginning of your posting about the free
interchange of ideas.  Being able to followup to someone's posting with
your thoughts is *quite* useful.

> Another simple change would be to prevent postings to multiple groups. Why
> post six copies, choose the MOST appropriate group.  If the author of
> an article feels it MUST be in more than one group, he can make the
> extra effort of posting it several times.  Currently, the ease with which
> you can place multiple group names in a posting almost guarantees a lack
> of concern about where it actually should belong.

Perhaps you misunderstand the multiple posting mechanism.  Articles
directed to multiple newsgroups are only posted once and are implemented
by the news software as unix "links" to articles in each newsgroup.  Posting
an article to multiple newsgroup only incurs additional cost to the net
in causing followups to continue to be posted to multiple newsgroups, which
can annoy people who feel the original posting or the followups have no
business in *their* newsgroup.  It also means that more people are exposed
to the original article, perhaps causing more people to followup on it.

Perhaps an answer to this would be to REQUIRE a "Followup-To" header
line listing one newsgroup when an article is posted to multiple
newsgroups.  This would require the author to choose what he thought
was the most appropriate newsgroup to continue the bulk of the
discussion.  Comments?

Please note that this discussion has been carried out in BOTH
net.news.group and net.sources.  It is my intention that such
commentary NOT be carried in a sources newsgroup and that changing the
sources newsgroups to moderated groups would only filter out such
commentary.  Additionally, requiring the original poster of

	"As long as we are taliking about rmgrouping ..."

to have specified followups going to net.news.group ONLY would have
eliminated most of the noise that has been posted to net.sources.  I
have included a Followup-To header in this article, so that further
followups to my thoughts will only go to net.news.group.
-- 
	roger long
	filenet corp
	trwrb!felix!bytebug