On Aug 4, 11:42, Dave Gomberg wrote:
} Subject: Re: Re SCIFAQ-L errors
Your last message showed a complete lack of understanding of the situation.
This one is a bit better.
} Posting of duplicates: I guess I would argue that deliberate posting of
} duplicates is a waste of bandwidth and therefore should not be encouraged.
Reposting FAQs on a periodic basis is standard practise on USENET. And
in many cases they work quite well in reducing USENET bandwidth. I post
to USENET, not a LISTSERV. Why is a LISTSERV imposing it's own policies
on USENET postings?
What is particularly annoying is that a listserv with the name "SCIFAQ-L"
that exists solely to remail sci.* FAQs isn't cogniscent of standard FAQ
practise of periodic repost and beats sci.* FAQ posters around the brain
for simply doing what they've always done, and will continue to do.
The whole intent behind SCIFAQ-L was to forward these articles, that
are often unchanged from issue to issue by their very nature. Thus,
the very creation of SCIFAQ-L encouraged the FAQ posting "culture".
[Una, lest you misunderstand - we consider the FAQs valuable, otherwise
we wouldn't do them. We encourage the further distribution of them,
otherwise, again, we wouldn't do them. But it really doesn't help
to have to pay per-byte communications costs for bogus bounces as I do.]
} If the poster cannot even be bothered to date the posting,
The USENET software dates it for me. I don't send FAQs to LISTSERVs.
I send them to USENET and conform to USENET practice and standards.
Why should I program around LISTSERV then? Should I also have to
program around Waffle with its 30K limit? Must I lie in my
Sender/From/Reply-To: to get PostalUnion to send its bogus "you're not
allowed to post" bounces into /dev/null? Was I supposed to program
around the server that cut my FAQ up into 6 pieces and reposted them in
someone else's name? Nonsense. The software should be fixed.
} I don't think Eric (or anyone else) should make a serious effort to
} facilitate double postings.
We're not asking him to facilitate double postings. Because we *aren't*
double posting. Nor do we expect him to special-case FAQs so that they
be transferred inspite of violating a list-owner's duplicate checking -
we really don't care what LISTSERV does with duplicate postings within
the LISTSERV's checksum window, as long as it doesn't bounce them back
at the originator.
All we're asking is, that if they're gatewaying USENET postings, that if
they must impose additional restrictions, that they conform to gatewaying
conventions and don't bug us. If the only way to gateway USENET is to
discard *all* duplicates regardless of source, with only an error log,
so be it.
} If somebody's faqs are so important, they should be archived
} at the recipient, or rerequested when needed.
My 5 FAQs are archived for anonymous FTP. And they include instructions
on how to retrieve new copies. But I don't provide a FAQ-mailing service.
Nor does everybody have FTP/WWW/Gopher/Prospero whatever. I wrote the
FAQs, keep them up to date, and maintain the roboposter. Plus several
distributed and supported medium-to-major software packages and a mailing
list[*]. That is enough. Why should I have to program around busted news
gateways? What will it be next week?
[*] And indeed, I use LISTSERV as a list exploder to keep my costs
down. For which I am both greatly indebted to Bill Gruber for his
assistance, and *quite* appreciative of a *really* excellent piece of
software called LISTSERV. An *extremely* good job Eric. But it has
this one major annoyance that makes it quite unfriendly in the multi-media
electronic world.
--
Chris Lewis; [log in to unmask]; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Psroff 3.0 info: [log in to unmask]
Ferret list: [log in to unmask]
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