🚀 go-pugleaf

packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer) writes:

  CP> I've suggested a rational way around other people's behavior
  CP> that we can't control -- monitor the subject line while reading
  CP> news. Consider the future: as net access becomes wider, breaches
  CP> of decorum are going to be commonplace. Complaining that some
  CP> crossposting or other is "inappropriate" is like complaining
  CP> that water is wet.

You're assuming that everyone reading these messages has the same
news reading capability that you have. Those of us who get the
messages through a Fido gateway, and download them directly to our
home computers, are spending precious online time downloading these
messages which are clearly not appropriate to the newsgroup. (That
may not sound like a big deal to you, but at a slow baud rate and
over long-distance lines, it does start to add up...) That's not a 
big deal if it happens, the person is pointed in the "right" direction, 
and discussions move on. But this "chicken vigil" discussion has been 
going on for several weeks now, with a large number of long messages 
that are *not* appropriate to "dc.general".

In "the future" (next week? next year? next century?) when wider net
access is available, the newsgroup model will probably have gone the
way of the dinosaur, and we'll have intelligent information hunter-
gatherers (like the "knowbot" concept Vint Cerf et al are working on)
to make sure we only get the informatoin we're interested in. For now,
we need to find ways to deal with the limits, and courtesy is 
*very* important. Sure, breaches of "decorum" are common. And I don't
think it's appropriate to flame a new or unskilled user who cross-posts
to a group that may not be ideal for a given subject. But I do think
it's appropriate for someone who has been asked, politely, several times
to move a discussion to another group (and been given specific suggestions
as to which groups are more appropriate) to do so.

<set soapbox=off>  ;-)