Manners when asking for information

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

In article <552 at bbxsda.UUCP> scott at bbxsda.UUCP (Scott Amspoker) writes:

| Yep.  I could never figure this one out.  Somebody posts a request for
| information in a particular newsgroup that he/she doesn't normally read.
| Then they go on to suggest that they will not continue to read that newsgroup
| for the next week or so to see the answers to their question.  Go figure.

  I have occasionally asked that people mail and I could summarize. I
think I have always done so if I got any answers. This saves a bunch of
postings of "let me know too" and allows deletion of sigs and quoting of
the original article. If done reasonably well it saves bandwidth and
results in a posting which is more useful to the readers. My recent
summary of replies to the questions on the Compuadd ESDI controller was
an example of this, I listed the names of the "tell me, too" replaies,
and nothing else.

  Some of us have other logistical problems. Because of disk space
limitations I have had to set expire times to be short and also dynamic
for some groups. This means that is a bunch of large postings come in
over the weekend I may lose postings in some groups (expire has gone as
low as 32 hours in some cases). Mail will sit there and wait until
Monday.

  I think that *in some cases* there are good reasons for requesting
mail rather than posting, particularly if the question is posted to a
number of groups which might not like the trqffic of the answers. People
complain less about a single summary, even if the topic is only
marginally related to the main group content.

  I agree that lazyness *by itself* is a poor reason to ask for mail.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me