Different FAQ maintainers may wish to go to different lengths to
accomodate the least common denominator (please, let's not have a
lengthy philosophical discussion on this point again, so soon after
the last one... :), but I think it's reasonable to refuse to try to
accomodate this one. I recall atrociously small limits on the number
of lines, but the software which is being used to "package" USENET
postings into QWK packets should be burdened with the responsibility
to split up long postings into multiple messages, and not the original
poster. This kind of splitting is a common (and old) work-around for
the limit on the number of lines -- I've used RoboMail and EZ-Reader,
two software packages that read QWK packets, and they both knew to
split replies I made which were too long into multiple messages, so
the recipient would be able to read all the lines.
Furthermore, you can give even more constructive advice by suggesting
that they and/or their sysop should investigate the use of SOUP
software instead of QWK. SOUP is an off-line reader format which gets
around this and other shortcomings of the QWK format (in QWK, for
example, the proper handling of USENET headers can only be kludged).
They can read alt.usenet.offline-reader for more information.
Lastly, mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu has an option to help those with
limits on how long a message they can receive. The size command takes
units of bytes, but they can use that to make sure that if the text
they are receiving is formatted to an average of say, 60, columns per
line, that they would receive fewer than 90 lines. With respect to
specific "complaints" about FAQ's being too long, you can tell them to
use the mail-server to get copies mailed to them that are chunked,
without inconveniencing others because of their software limitations.
== Ping Huang
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved