From: Scott Hazen Mueller (scott@zorch.sf-bay.org)
Date: Tue Jun 11 2002 - 14:44:20 CDT
The problem that I see with this proposal as floated is that there is no
benefit to the group of moderators it has been proposed to. The reason for my
saying that is that 'moderators@isc.org' represents (for the most part and to
the best of my knowledge) moderators in the Big8+alt, and these worldwide
groups are conducted mostly in English and hence 7-bit ASCII is adequate. The
primary benefit of the proposed encapsulation is for non-English discussions,
and you won't find many moderators of those here.
Frankly, I oppose this change to the existing system. Leaving aside the "MIME
is evil" argument, existing moderation software was written without any MIME
capabilities, and there are anywhere from dozens to hundreds of scripts,
macros, programs, filters and who knows what all else that "knows" what a news
article submission looks like, and may or may not deal with a broken C News
submission, but is not known to work with the new format. If you look at the
allocation of authority versus responsibility, it's all screwed up - the
people who will have to fix all of these programs are being given little to no
say in the decision as to whether their working systems will be broken by this
proposed format change.
The moderation community is all-volunteer and has limited resources. I submit
that cramming a format change down our collective throat is not in the best
interests of Usenet. Let the people who will benefit from changes to the
submission protocol - those participating in groups that require 8-bit
character sets in news messages gatewayed through e-mail - be the ones that
pay the price of that benefit, not an unrelated group such as the mainstream
Usenet moderators.
-- Scott Hazen Mueller scott@zorch.sf-bay.org or zorch!scott Moderator, ba.announce; submissions to sfbay-announce@zorch.sf-bay.org Moderator, comp.sys.sun.announce; submissions to css-announce@zorch.sf-bay.org Moderator, news.admin.technical; submissions to natech@zorch.sf-bay.org Moderator, comp.newprod; submissions to newprod@zorch.sf-bay.org Moderator, rec.arts.sf.announce; submissions to sf-announce@zorch.sf-bay.org