3 Feb
2000
3 Feb
'00
4:09 a.m.
Prelude to this reply:
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2. With the old system, if someone forgot to change
the header, there was a
spurious message, which I deleted. Some people might object to the waste of
bandwidth, but it merely gave me one extra message to delete.
With the new system, if someone forgets to change the header, the
information doesn't reach the list. This causes a bigger waste of
bandwidth, because you get more people answering the same question,
not having seen each other's replies. And it stifles discussion,
because replies-to-replies often never get generated (and these are
sometimes the most useful).
<singing>Exactly!</singing>
And I guarantee you that if the list stays the way it is there will be so
many duplicate messages flying about that those of us against the current
system will be getting huffy all the time, constantly bitching to the list
about it, which will result in more flame wars than were ever sparked by
my bad attitude.
And to reiterate, I think the most important point is that THE DISCUSSION
WILL INEVITABLY SPLINTER OFF INTO PRIVATE DISCUSSIONS AND THIS DOES NOT
BENEFIT THE LIST WHATSOEVER, not to mention future generations who will
quite possibly miss a LOT of great information that could have been
archived from public messages but instead was lost to time since the
replies were private.
This list is archived in at least two places that I know of:
Classic Computers Mailing List Archives
http://www.heydon.org/kevan/mlists/classiccmp/
(currently down according to Kevan's previous message)
Classic Computers Mailing List Searchable Archives
http://mail-index.nice.ru/classiccmp/wgindex.html
This is an EXTRAORDINARILY valuable resource that will be diminished if
many excellent replies to many good questions are administered in private
discussions.
Humankind does not gain by having to ask the same questions over and over
again, only to have to repeat the work that someone already did to answer
the question.
I am on several lists, of which about half work the
old way (reply to
the list by default). This is very convenient on all of them. Of the
others, on the one where I have asked questions I have received
substantially the same reply privately from several people, but the
discussion hasn't borne fruit on the list.
In other words, that information is effectively lost to time. That's
shameful, considering our collective mission is to preserve information.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
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