From: David Iain Greig (dgreig@darwin.ediacara.org)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 13:06:04 CDT
On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 10:57:14AM -0700, Jay Denebeim wrote:
>
> On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>
> > The job is not to replace all existing tools, or upgrade them, it's only
> > to provide something usable for extended character set groups.
>
> Uh, that's not what it sounds like to me. It sounds like they're planning
> on encapsulating all the news. Again, pretty much every moderated
> newsgroup rolls their own moderation software. Some more sophisticated
> than others. All of them different that incorporates different rules
> specific to the individual group.
Talk.origins uses a C program written originally for (I recall) soc.
singles.california. It cannot handle encapsulation of posts.
I find Bill's position laudable in theory, and execrable in practice.
There are myriads or moderated newsgroups; to think there is a single
tool that will work for all of them is madness.
As far as I can see from the discussion here, USEFOR has not evidenced
any concern for the problems moderators will face. Exactly why should
we, in turn, evidence interest in their ideas?
I appreciate the problems of local character sets; I also appreciate
that everyone seems to agree that email is where a real solution
needs to come from; what I do NOT appreciate is the decision to risk
seriously breaking Usenet because we can't fix email as easily.
Ad-hoc solutions for long-term problems suck. Encapsulation, as
propounded (poorly) by it's proponents on the moderators
discussion list, *screams* 'ad hoc'.
Apologies for tone.
--D.
-- david iain greig greig@ediacara.org moderator, talk.origins sp4 kox http://www.ediacara.org/~greig arbor plena alouattarum