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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: [meta] excessive posting was: Techniques in Adventure Game Design
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Daryl McCullough <daryl@cogentex.com> wrote:
>>If this onslaught of nauseating advertisements for his poor
>>quality game can be stopped by telling him why it is offensive,
>>then I believe it should be done.
>
>I still don't understand why it is offensive or nauseating
>to you. It's easy enough to ignore.

Is it easy to ignore 100 posters advertising their
game once every two weeks? 500 posters? 1000 posters?
1 poster yes. But this is one of those cases where the
categorical imperative pretty much applies. It would
be a bad behavior if everyone did it; there is nothing
stopping everyone from doing it except that it IS
netiquette NOT TO DO IT.

It is inappropriate to repeatedly repost about small
improvements in a game. One can start a private mailing
list for that purpose. Repeated postings about something
with a larger audience--say a windows interpreter for one
of the major game systems--in other words, an interpreter
for the most widely used platform, applicable to a wide
number of games--one would draw the line in a different
place.

Some things are inappropriate to post. That is why
there are multiple newsgroups in the first place;
things are supposed to be posted to the newsgroups
where people want to read them, people aren't supposed
to have to "put up" with posts which are "easy to ignore",
by which we logic we could justify doing away with
all newsgroups entirely--just have one newsgroup with
everything in it, and ignore what you don't like.

And again, to clarify the situation, how many posts
have there been advertising Photopia and new versions
of it? How about Spider & Web? Being Andrew Plotkin?
Why is it that when one or two people don't understand
the right way to advertise a game, we should NOT act
to correct it? If we don't, those 50 or 100 other authors
WILL think 'this is the right thing to do', and they
WILL start doing it.

It amazes me, given the disintegration of Usenet over
the last five years, that you can sit around thinking
inappropriate posting is not a problem.

SeanB
