Re: Where Angels Fear To Tread

[Paul Schliesser <paulsc@eos.net>]

>1) Work through the digest, deleting those messages I don't need any more and
>   don't want to reply to.
>2) Reply to the messages IF STILL NECESSARY. Since I read the whole digest I
>   know if someone else has already answered.

Christoph,

This doesn't make sense to me. If everyone waited for the digest and 
stopped posting and responding to messages in real time, there would BE 
no digest, and you would have nothing to read.

>It has nothing to do with paranormal powers. I am on the digest and regularly
>do the following:

You are reading everything after the fact, from the perspective of an 
observer, not a participant. Hindsight doesn't require paranormal powers.

If everyone replied to digests only, you would have huge vollies of 
replies, generated as each digest hit the list, which would in turn be 
incorporated into the next digest, continuing the cycle. At least as-is, 
the list slightly resembles a stream of conversation.

>   Of course I know that I cannot
>   know if in the meantime since reception of the digest a new answer was
>   given.

If you see this as a problem with the digest, why don't you allow the 
same lattitude for individual messages? As several people have pointed 
out, there are lots of funny things which happen to individual messages. 
I often see several replies or responses before I see the original 
message. There are often questions which seem to have gone unanswered for 
a while, and then get a flood of replies. I've even gotten answers to 
some of my questions before I saw my own post come back on the list. 
Multiple answers to the same questions, which show different members' 
biases, insights and points-of-view, are part of what makes the list 
interesting.

There are a lot of different ways that people get, read, reply to and use 
the messages on this list. Some collect a daily or several-times-daily 
batch of messages, some are online all day, and some read digests at a 
later point. People are in different time zones all over the world. The 
farther away (network-wise) you are from the list server, the more likely 
it is that individual messages will be routed along different paths, and 
will arrive in a different order, or will be shifted in time.

I don't mean this to sound like a flame; it just seems like there are 
misconceptions here about how mail lists and the internet work.


- - Paul