From: Edward Reid (edward@paleo.org)
Date: Sat May 18 2002 - 10:17:10 CDT
At 10:47 AM -0400 5/18/02, SiKing wrote:
>OK, so that is good. But the argument "it will make the acceptance
>policy
>too complicated" still holds, right?
"Expires" can be written referring only to a calendar. "Supersedes"
requires finding the previous article and cutting and pasting the
message ID (since retyping it is unreasonable). That makes Supersedes
quite a bit more cumbersome to handle manually.
Also, people *will* misspell "supersedes" even when they know better --
at least, people whose native language is English and who touch-type --
just because the combination is a bit unexpected and conflicts with
other well-known words (cede, concede, intercede, precede). I know from
experience ... during the short period when I posted my hand, I got it
wrong several times. And FWIW, about 400 years ago I took 5th place in
my school spelling bee. OK, it was only 40 years ago. Just seems like
400.
>I don't know where I'm going with this. I was just browsing the
>news.answers, there were over 1500 documents there at that moment, and
>just
>as a guess I would say that several hundred of them were duplicates.
Simple fact is that Supersedes doesn't work for the same reasons that
Cancel doesn't work: abuse. I don't see any way to solve this short of
having a PK signature on every article that might be cancelled or
superseded. That requires getting a lot of people to agree on the
procedure and getting it implemented in a lot of news servers and at
least some news clients. That doesn't seem likely to happen any time
soon. Son-of-1036 isn't even approved.
Therefore, the question of where you're going with it is easy to
answer. You can complain, or you can live with it. I find that the
latter taxes my energy less. If you really want to do something about
it and have the time and energy, get involved in developing a solution
to the abuse problem and getting it accepted and implemented.
Edward Reid
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Jul 03 2002 - 10:13:20 CDT