Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/02/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]"Peter Jon White" <pjwhite@tiac.net> wrote: > I've never posted to a newsgroup but I have logged on to read some > postings. The thing that struck my was the nastiness of many of the > postings. As I understand it, with a mailing list, someone can police > things and block entry by people who let their emotions control what > they type. Please correct me if I'm wrong but with a newsgroup, there > is no way to keep the hot heads out. (That's what I've been told.) Some newsgroups are moderated. Some mailing lists, like this one, are unmoderated. The great advantage of Usenet newsgroups is that there are VERY clear guidelines about posting binaries. Binary attachments like the ones that plague this list are TOTALLY out of order except in special binaries newsgroups. And often news posting programs will automatically refuse articles with excessive quotation, like many articles here. "Hot heads" are far less of a problem than bozos who can't edit or don't know how to operate their own software. I'd rather get 100 lines of obscene ranting than 1000 lines of encoded Microsoft gibberish any day. It's been a long time since I've read any Usenet newsgroup that worked as badly as this list. > I am on 6 different mailing lists and there is virtually no nastiness. Well, there's plenty on this one. By contrast, the Medium Format Digest, which is moderated, works very well indeed. I have only ever seen one off-topic message slip through by mistake and that was only a few lines long. Moving to Usenet would be an improvement, but moving to a moderated mailing list (or at least one that automatically filtered out quotation and binaries) would be a better option. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- jack@purr.demon.co.uk - Jack Campin, 2 Haddington Place, Edinburgh EH7 4AE