Subj : Re: No More Long Posts
To   : Daryl Stout
From : Angus McLeod
Date : Sun Jul 17 2005 11:29 pm

  Re: Re: No More Long Posts
  By: Daryl Stout to FINNIGANN on Sun Jul 17 2005 17:44:00

 >   First off, I apologize for the long reply.
 > 
 > F>No one said that. it's the long wouting that was mentioned. It wasn't need
 >  >to quote the entire thing for an atta boy at the end.
 > 
 >   That's the impression I got ("are you going to post ~600 line messages
 > again?"). I agree that quoting the entire deal just for a one line reply
 > is not good BBS etiquette.

It was I, who asked "Do you plan to post more ~600 line bulletins here?" 
in a post which did *NOT* quote the entire long post, but quoted a SINGLE 
line thereof, to identify the message.

See my post dated Fri Jul 15 2005 10:05:44 AST to confirm if you wish.

 >   The reason for the one long post is that I usually have to edit the
 > textfiles of the Amateur Radio Newsline, The ARRL Contesters Rate Sheet,
 > and The ARRL Letter, because the length of the lines are too wide for
 > BBS message posting. This means going through the entire messages, which
 > I agree can be quite lengthy, with all the articles. It took me nearly
 > 15 minutes just to reformat this past weeks Newsline...

All of this is a good reason for you *NOT* to post the lengthy bulletin.  
You could have posted a simple link to the original source material.  If 
you wanted to do more, you might have extracted the various sub-headings 
so as to inform readers what might be found on the end of that link.

I asked if you planned to post more such bulletins because I wanted to 
know if it made sense for me to suggest these things,

 > then, I got jumped on for the long post in this echo...and that has 
 > happened before in other ham radio related echoes as well.

I don't know about other echoes, but if anybody 'jumped on you' in this 
echo, it wasn't me.  By no stretch of the imagination could the simple 
query "Do you plan to post more ~600 line bulletins here?" be described as 
'jumping' on someone.  If you detected a degree of dissatisfaction with 
the prospect of more such lengthy bulletins, you would be correct.  I 
think posting articles of such length are unnecessary, if a link to the 
original source material can be posted instead.  But no 'jumping' was 
involved in my post.

 >   Also, one can get more timely delivery of The ARRL Letter, the
 > Contesters Rate Sheet, or W1AW bulletins, by going to www.arrl.org on
 > the web, click on the TEXT ONLY link, look for the BULLETINS link, then
 > click on the desired item.

I'd like to suggest a script that reads the bulletins on the apropriate 
day, filters out various headings/sub-headings in order to construct a 
table-of-Contents (if one is not directly available at the top of the 
document) and post this ToC along with a link back to the additional 
material.  

Now, that would be a valuable service.  It would allow persons reading 
this sub to quickly see what material was covered in the full bulletin, 
and provide a way to quickly reference that material if it were of 
interest.  A sort of information-concentrator function.  

For example, you could periodically process 

	http://www2.arrl.org/w1aw/2005-index.html

and pull off new items.  You'd get a date, bulletin number, URL and 
subject.  Pull the document, extract the first paragraph and generate a 
message to the BBS quoting the first paragraph, and adding "For more, 
visit <Link>".  Or you could do it daily, give a summary of all bulletins 
for the day with the subject and first paragraph of each, followed by a 
link to the full bulletin.  If the number of bulletins exceeds some set 
number (10?  25?) Drop the text of the paragraph, and include the subject 
and link only.

I'm itching to fire up LWP::Simple and do it myself, but I won't deprive 
you of the pleasure.



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