🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@ficc.ferranti.com writes:
   Why should we have to switch to an even more expensive transport mechanism?

Because MBASes inflict their costs on a blortful of unsuspecting good
neighbors.  The person who wants the stuff ought to be the one who
pays for it.

   If you guys offering anonymous UUCP would standardise your chat
   scripts it'd probably be a different matter.

That'll be darn near impossible.  Around here, most people get into
osu-cis via a Micom port selector that can be kindly described as
temperamental, at least in conjunction with the varying UUCP flavors
out there.  Common suggestion to people having trouble is to dial the
Micom a couple of times by hand to see what the timing looks like at
their end.  Direct dial-ins to our machines are scarce, and you might
be surprised by the number of people who are truly clueless on how to
deal with a chat script of _any_ kind -- "standardization" would not
help.  (E.g., "What is `\c' by itself supposed to do?"  Well, duh, it
means "do nothing."  I would think people setting up UUCP links would
know that.  A lot don't seem to.)

   The irony is that it's us UUNET customers that are likely the main store
   and forward sites you're trying to protect.

Not based on the source of most requests I've seen to set up
mail-based service to osu-cis' archives -- I get a couple each month.
Few such requests arrive by paths which have any reference to uunet in
them.

In the month of May, (the apparent) osu-cis serviced total Uanon
connect time of 24 days 13:11 (107,351 minutes).  That's more than 3/4
duty cycle of at least one Uanon at all times.  I think that there's
rather a lot of somebodies out there who think that access to such an
archive is worth the cost.  The fact that uunet started such access
(via the 1-900-GOT-SRCS route) tends to support that view.  As I type
this, osu-cis is shoveling bits at 9 sites, 5 news/mail neighbors and
4 Uanon users -- that is to say, his lines are maxed out (there are 7
lines otherwise occupied, or dead).

--karl
--
Depression \di-'presh-un\  n.  A condition observed on return from
3 weeks' vacation to find ~2000 mail messages waiting for oneself.