IUBio GIL .. BIOSCI/Bionet News .. Biosequences .. Software .. FTP

imagine all will leave ..

Tim Cutts timc at chiark.greenend.org.uk
Mon Nov 15 05:21:05 EST 1999


In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.991115094531.15900B-100000 at caporal.molgen.mpg.de>,
Steffen Hennig <hennig at molgen.mpg.de> wrote:
>
>Dear staden-newsgroup-members !
>
>We got a nice demonstration in the last days what a UCR is ( unsubscribe
>chain reaction ). Wouldn't somebody like to start the SCR for compen-
>sation ?

:-)

The problem is of course that the majority of readers of this group are
actually reading it through a mailing list gateway.  (a) This means it's
slightly more awkward for them to avoid the spam and (b) subscribing and
unsubscribing are not easy.  Most mailing list users seem to forget that
the address you use to unsubscribe is not the same as the address you
use to post to the list.

This is not their fault, but the fault of the poor design of most
mailing list software, which does make things rather awkward, especially
for non-geeks.  :-)

I think we should encourage people to use news readers ratherthan mailing
lists to access this group.  The advantages are many (proper threading
of articles, automatic selection of articles of interest, automatic
killing of junk) and the disadvantages are few (possibly the fact that
you need to learn to use a new program).

Admittedly some sites may not have a local news server that they can
reliably connect to, but that is easily fixable by your sysadmin or ISP.

It's a matter of using the right tools for the right job, which applies
just as much to internet communication as it does to anything else.

Tim.




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