I seem to have spoken too tersely about a matter which I've been thinking
about for a while.
First of all, I think that Mr Ortman's subsequent message showed that these
two items (the kookiness and the ISP advertisements) were more intertwined
than his first message showed. And the advertisements were not delimited
into a "signature" even in the first message; and even discounting leading and
trailing blank lines it numbered ten lines in size. The first message was a
collection of various personal-agenda-pushing items, and the advertisements
fit right in. In this way it seemed quite different to me than a message
with a trailing "are you a yahoo? www.yahoo.com". Anyway, what I was doing
was just quoting the least faq-maintenance-relevant section.
But most of all, kookiness is a fair distance down my list of things I'm most
irked by on faq-maintainers, because it has not been a major part of the
traffic. It's other kinds of inappropriate postings I'd really like to
filter out. I should mention that these feelings are based on all the
mailing lists I subscribe to, not just this one.
I should say at this point that I don't feel that resolving any of these
problems is necessarily a big priority because the total traffic on this list
is quite low by modern standards. However, I am annoyed by a variety of
things which I consider abuse of the list, and the most common occurrence out
of them is the asking of newbie unix questions. I don't subscribe to
comp.unix.questions for a reason. It is (or should be) my choice not to read
it or its echoes.
Discussing in detail how to telnet to port 119 to post your faq is one thing.
Perhaps annoying to me personally, but clearly (in my opinion) on topic.
But questions along the lines of "how do I remove a file in unix with a
capital letter in its name?" are really inappropriate here, and there ARE
appropriate fora for them. At a minimum, I think that people should not
ANSWER such questions posted here. I think that posting such questions here
is very rude.
You may disagree.
I would also like to point out that a moderator can reduce pointless
discussion considerably without even rejecting any articles, by responding
in the obvious way to articles right at their end, e.g. "[actually, 1+1=2,
not 3 -- ed]". This obviates the flood of followups without actually
rejecting ("censoring", if you prefer) any articles.
regards,
ajr
[perhaps none of this is crucial for faq-maintainers due to the low volume.
--ed]
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