Re: FAQs and crossposting policies

era eriksson (reriksso@cc.helsinki.fi)
Tue, 4 Feb 1997 08:08:34 +0200 (EET)

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On Mon, 3 Feb 1997 19:45:19 -0600 (CST),
Kent Landfield <kent@landfield.com> wrote:
> # The stated reason for making these changes is to reduce spool area
> # consumption by (improperly) crossposted binaries and widely-crossposted
> # flamefests.
> If they're telling you this then they may not be thinking it
> through (or maybe I'm not...). Crossposting is normally implemented
> using links" to a single copy. If they institute the crossposting
> limit, those that want to be seen in 10 groups will post 10 copies.
> A crossposted copy would only take up 1/10th the space... And disk
> space is what, $200 US a Gigabyte ? And this is Netcom, right ?
> Sounds like a PR nightmare in the making.

Seconded. If they're tight on disk space, ask them instead to not
subscribe to every newsgroup in the known universe, at least not
unless users request it. I have +never+ +ever+ seen an on-topic post
from Netcom (and rarely from the US in general) in any of the local
Finnish sfnet.* or finet.* groups, but they regularly attract spam
sent off from some ISP with a desire to offer 20,000 newsgroups just
because big numbers sound good. (The Swedish swnet.* groups seem to
have a better ratio, for some reason. Still, most anything from a .com
domain can be killed on sight. [Another good method would be to kill
anything obviously not written in the local language{s}.])

> Looks as if they would like to go back towards the UUCP net days...

For the general FAQ reading public, I think WWW FAQ servers (such as
yours, Kent :-) are a better solution generally. Net.newbies seldom
seem to have the patience or knowledge to search for a FAQ in an
overcrowded newsgroup, but with a well-organized system of FAQ
repositories, you can at least simply hand them a URL (instead of ask
them to "look around in the newsgroup and see if the FAQ hasn't
expired already" or something to that effect).

> # Or should we just accept it as life in the nineties, and revise our own
> # working habits to fit within such policies? Maybe the crosspost policies
> # for news.answers need to be rethought.

I think that with a big enough campaign you can get the Netcom admins
to reconsider their policy with regard to obvious FAQ postings (i.e.
anything cross-posted to news.answers, as suggested) -- but it should
probably be made as easy as possible for them. Anybody have the time
and knowledge to patch the patches ...? (More info about what patches
they are using would probably be necessary.)

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Next message: E. Allen Smith: "Re: FAQs and crossposting policies"
Previous message: Todd C. Lawson: "Re: FAQs and crossposting policies"
Maybe in reply to: Tom Lane: "FAQs and crossposting policies"
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