The best argument against turning british-cars into a newsgroup is to
spend a few minutes reading one of the rec.autos.* groups. What are
they typically filled with? 90% garbage postings about: beating
speeding tickets, Slick 50, radar detectors, The Club; idiots who seem
to be incapable of keeping their personal differences private; non
related cross postings; people who think every single rec.autos.*
newsgroup is interested in the '87 Buick they have for sale; stupid
arguments about the superiority of Japanese/American/German/Swedish/
you-name-it cars; racist diatribes; and I'm sure any one of you can add
a half dozen more similar topics to this list. british-cars doesn't
needs or deserve this kind of crap.
Roland
From rwg1@cornell.edu Tue Sep 11 12:00:44 2001
From: (Roger Garnett) rwg1@cornell.edu
To: (British Cars) british-cars@autox.team.net
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 15:10:15
Subject: Re: newsgroup NOT!- other solutions
Back in the days when the b-c list had a seemingly Lucas based server, and
either crashed often, or got moved from place to place, and I had a poor
mail reader (basic UNIX mail), I used to favor a newsgroup for stability,
and readability. The disadvantages (noise level, people with mail only
access, friendlyness, etc) always outweighed those advantages. Modern
technology has now solved the problems of yesterdays mail, but newsgroups
are worse than ever!
Since mjb started hosting the list on Hoosier (early '91 or before), and now
Triumph, stability of the list server has become a non-issue.
That leaves readability, which seems to be about the only current reason to
desire a newsgroup, if your newsreaders is easier to use than your mail.
Readability and volume management are functions of your mail software. Here
are 2 solutions:
1) If you only have lousy mail programs available, find a way to port mail
messages to your newsreader- this is possible on many systems today,
without too much effort, even on a local PC.
2) Get a better mail reader! This is often the simplist solution. Modern
mail programs can do wonders- There are programs available on all major
platforms (UNIX, Mac, PC, Windows) that can do things like filter incomming
mail by source, (like put all your british car mail into it's own folder)
and then sort by subject, delete a subject, etc. Problem solved.
Free mailers I know of:
On UNIX, mush, elm, and pine can all do this. Pegasus on Mac, PC, and
Windows really makes it easy. There are more such programs all the time, as
these features are getting added to most commercial mail programs as well.
Often, you can even convert mail from your institutions mail format to that
of a cheap but flexible mail program.
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