Hi Judy
and all
After sending you the link to the anti-hoax site I'd found, and then
reading Bill's message, I WAS sorry for being so curt. On the other hand it
was an apt portrayal of my exasperation. My MOMENTARY exasperation -- which
will, of course, be the sort of thing one usually is sorry about
afterwards. I am.
What I usually do when I get chain mail is to copy some sentence out of the
original and paste it into Altavista (in quotes). In this case: "If anyone
can afford this Bill Gates is the man". It gave me exactly ONE hit, which
was an anti-hoax site. Now, Bill has explained why one should not propagate
chain mail AT ALL, for ANY purpose, hoax or not: I have seen a couple of
examples where school kids have started an email avalanche upon themselves
for the innocent purpose of a school theme.
So while we're at Net mores in general, I'd like to send a little greeting
from the kids on a SF-Fantasy list I've been spending some time on this
winter:
At 22.59 -0500 0-01-17, Morel scrobe:
> * When replying to a previous message, quote ONLY what you're replying
>to, OR synopsize the previous message so that we can continue to follow the
>discussion w/out drowning in a message we've already read.
They're a nice and funny community over there, a good place to spend some
cyber leisure. Their list is devoted to one single SFF author, who
occasionally contributes to the list himself. I think it is out of respect
for him that the kids really adhere to the above rule from their Welcome
Message, and keep their postings reasonably clean from leftovers -- he
learnt the habit in his old BBS and newsgroup days -- and, of course, if
you break traffic rules of the list, you run the risk of being whapped with
the Salmon of Correction. As new participants keep stumbling into the
village commons, one or the other of the "oldtimers" dons the parental robe
of re-floating the rules of traffic. And it works. No litter in the streets.
In the early days of the Xlists there was also a quite regular recurrence
of house-care about "the bandwidth" -- various contributors taking on the
role of sermonizing about snipping excess bytes from postings. With
increasing capacity of the facilities it seems the community has become
more lenient. Or less willing to play the preacher. Or just busier and more
tired. So we get quite a lot of postings with cascading tails of old
matter. Of course taste and habits differ, and if dirt is matter out of
place, this form of dirt may not matter to everybody. As for myself, I find
it more asthetically pleasing to clear the table before I put out a new
meal.
What do you think?
Eva
doubly irrational
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:16 PST