Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Why is my post being rejected?
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.164047.14369@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1991 16:40:47 GMT
References: <14JUN91.15182407@nerus.pfc.mit.edu> <1991Jun14.155246.12371@ecst.csuchico.edu> <1991Jun17.190440.26978@zoo.toronto.edu> <kre.677218797@mundamutti.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <kre.677218797@mundamutti.cs.mu.OZ.AU> kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz) writes:
>>>-->	441 inews: Article rejected: news included more text than new text
>
>>Actually, it's a dumb idea that has accomplished almost nothing.
>
>No its not - it might not actually be stopping people who want to
>from quoting lots - but it was never intended to do that.  It has
>just about wiped out those articles that we used to see all the time
>which consisted of nothing but the entire previous article, quoted,
>and no response at all (ie: caused by users who have no idea what
>they're doing).

I dunno, I still see some of those at times.  More to the point, if *that*
is the objective, there are ways to do it that don't encourage people to
devise new quoting conventions.  (For example, C News postnews puts a dummy
line in the message body and then looks to make sure you have deleted it.)
This was the wrong solution.

>I would guess that it also causes more users to think a bit about how
>much they are quoting, and edit more severly.

I doubt it very much.  Any consistent hurdle is jumped automatically.
People only think about it when they run into it for the first time.
-- 
"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
