Against my better judgment, I'll reply to this, since it is a point not heretofore addressed. Dave McGuire wrote, This argument doesn't scale, particularly in our very narrow field of interest. How would you get the (to use an example on my mind) simtel.nets or the download.coms of the world to be interested in Don Maslin's boot disk archive? How would you *find* someone with that kind of interest *and* the needed (per your claim) disk space and network investment? The kneejerk answer to b) is, natch, this list. And look at how *few* on this list would actually measure up to your criteria for the network alone, let alone interest level. So, by your argument, someone like that would therefore have no recourse but to let their collection rot because they shouldn't make it available at all. It also makes the corollary that those who spend money on some sort of hosting are therefore not spending enough, something proponents of this view have not adequately addressed and have no right to assert. This is the kind of thing that makes mega-archives, and mega-archives collapse under their own weight. What this really boils down to is elitism, that people aren't allowed to contribute in *any* way to the community if their method of contribution isn't (per the arbitrary criteria of you, Jim and others of like mind) 100%. Baloney. This isn't a "bad neighbour" situation like open proxies, badly configured mailhosts or Trojanned boxes where such machines cause damage and *should* be excluded: this is someone offering their files for the uptake of the community. If people used your yardstick to determine if they could make such offerings, then there would be tremendously fewer avenues of of such contribution. I'll return to my regularly scheduled lurk. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones. -----------------------------------