Article-I.D.: tolerant.178
Posted: Fri Oct 18 13:25:24 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Oct-85 15:15:00 EDT
References: <1134@sdcsvax.UUCP> <1192@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Organization: Tolerant Systems, Inc.  San Jose, CA
Lines: 39
Keywords: net.overload
Xref: watmath net.news:4098 net.micro.mac:3053

In article <1192@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP,
    (Beth Christy) writes:

 > Sites who carry net.sources.mac have already generously agreed to allow
 > this access to their users.

Let's not kid ourselves.  The folks paying the bills at most of the sites
probably have no idea that net.sources.mac exists.  The "generous agreement"
is that as long as the phone bill isn't too bad, and the level of technical
information coming in remains good, and we/they don't see too many people
burning up too much time reading news, the game goes on.  We get a lot of
technical benefit from usenet, which was our justification for getting on in
the first place, but I fear that the dreaded "day of reckoning" is fast
approaching, and staving it off will require that we be better about
policing ourselves.  That means keeping traffic reasonable.

In the specific case of net.sources.mac, I don't feel that shareware is the
problem, or that banning it does that much good.  However, the number of
duplicate, or nearly duplicate, postings in net.sources.mac is pretty high,
as are "the copy of X we received was mangled, could somebody please repost
it to the entire planet because we're too lazy to check with our upstream
sites first" requests.  The amount of non- or partially-debugged code that
gets posted is also disappointing.

I would like to see a mod.sources.mac, but don't have the time or the energy
to volunteer (maybe some poor grad student is looing for an excuse to delay
a thesis?).  In the mean time, there are a couple of things that we can do
to keep things under control.  Beyond the obvious, (like not including an
entire BinHex file in a reply), we can make sure that our code is debugged
before we post it.  Before posting a file that we just uploaded, we can
download and run it to make sure that the copy we're about to post is good.
We can check with local sites (or have our SA do so) to see if anyone has a
good copy of a file that got mangled, rather than posting a request to the
entire world.  We can repeat to ourselves daily, "There Ain't No Such Thing
As A Free Lunch".
-- 
  David W. Smith                 {nsc,ucbvax}!tolerant!dws
  Tolerant Systems, Inc.
  408/946-5667                    [Standard Disclaimer]