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>>entirely, I can see a better way to reduce the garbage-per-article rate:
>>eliminate the "F" command from the news programs! (For those not familiar
>>with "rn", this submits a followup article and includes the parent article.)
>>If the only way to include quotes from other articles in one's own article
>>would be to type it all in by hand, character by character, I'm sure some
>>people would think twice about including 50 extra lines in every followup!
>
>This person would appear not to know how to use an editor...
>--
>James C. Armstrong, Jnr. {ihnp4,cbosgd,akgua}!abnji!nyssa
No, that's not the point--the point is that most of us would (I'm assuming)
rather not read articles from those people who do not know how to use the
editor, or who think it's too much trouble to edit out all the unnecessary
lines. My memory fails me right now, but I also seem to remember some times
when the editor would scroll all those quoted lines off the top of the screen,
so that a naive and careless person would forget to edit them out.
I don't think that forcing someone to type in the quotation by hand is a good
idea because it would lead to all sorts of misquotes. Perhaps some sort of
informative message, like the one warning you about all the people you're going
to be boring by posting at all, could warn you that nobody wants to read all
that stuff again.
L S Chabot ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot
Larry West
> I don't think that forcing someone to type in the quotation by hand is a good
> idea because it would lead to all sorts of misquotes. Perhaps some sort of
> informative message, like the one warning you about all the people you're going
> to be boring by posting at all, could warn you that nobody wants to read all
> that stuff again.
>
> L S Chabot ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot
Eric Norman (ejnorman@uwmacc) posted an article (1592@uwmacc)
which contained a possible solution to this problem, which I'll
rephrase here:
The Followup routine copies in the entire text of the article,
prefaced by some obvious character(s) ["==> "], then lets you
edit to your heart's delight. After you are done, the Followup
routine throws away every line which is unaltered from the
original article. Thus, users would have to change some
character(s) [e.g., "==> " to "> "] to keep the quoted material.
One modification that seems worthwhile to me is that if the quoted
lines are broken into small sections with new text in between, they
should not be deleted (to provide for point-by-point rebuttals).
Presumably the Followup routine would let the user review the
followup before posting it ("RN" does this, of course).
I know we would see a rash of articles where follow-ups referred
to null text (or worse, the wrong text), but this could be pretty
amusing anyway, and would encourage the poster of the followup to
be more careful in the future. I hope. Currently, the poster
sees the long quotation and thinks nothing of it.
Another minor alternative is that instead of simply deleting the
text, it could be replaced with a message like:
--- Excessive quotation automatically deleted ---
and this seems more responsible, though less funny.
---
While on the subject of changing what the user posts,
how about replacing RN's "*** REPLACE ... ***" (or anything
which _remotely_resembles_ this:-) with:
*** This followup is posted by a naive user: ***
Yes, I know, that's already what it means....
--
Larry West (USA+619-)452-6771
Institute for Cognitive Science non-business hours: 452-2256
UC San Diego (mailcode C-015)
La Jolla, CA 92093 U.S.A.
ARPA: <we...@nprdc.ARPA> or <we...@ucsd.ARPA>
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