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Date:      Sun, 10 Oct 1999 02:39:19 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Tom Huppi <th@huppi.com>
To:        "Paul M. Lambert" <plambert@magiclemurs.com>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Roasting Newbies
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9910100155420.21615-100000@sis.huppih.com>
In-Reply-To: <19991009211015.A736@pinky.magiclemurs.com>

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On Sat, 9 Oct 1999, Paul M. Lambert wrote:

> Perhaps something like what is used in the perl newsgroups: a bot that
> autoresponds the first time an address sends a message, to say, "Here's
> a list of good places to look for answers."
> 
> It's a little more in-your-face, but being automated, a little harder
> to argue with.  (For example, it's easy to ignore an email reply to the
> bot that deserves to be ignored without making it seem like such a personal
> judgement).

I'd have welcomed it and dutifully filed it away with the rest of
my list_admin stuff...particularly if it had some good pointers to
resources.

> These are, of course, ideas.  The purpose here is brainstorming.
>
> --plambert

Here's a brainstorm/observation.  I appologize in advance if the
idea has been discussed here before...

My web host (who now has over 60,000 accounts and has been 100%
FreeBSD from day one, btw) has an ordinary old nntp server and a
series of internal newsgroups covering various topics.  Mail,
databases, etc. They apperently implemented it when the mailing
lists got out of hand, but it was before my time.  I love the
thing.  I can track interesting threads at my leisure using the
newsreader that I am familiar with.  They have not expired any
articles so I can search (the subject lines at least) back several
years.  The main problem is that if I lose my .newrc, I have to
download the headers again, but it is quite preferable (to me) to
recieving the 100-200 e-mails that I get from the lists that I am
on.  I'm one of those poor souls with a lousy connection.  I use
(and appreciate) the mailing list archive search, but am not
convinced that it always produces accurate results in terms of
threading. Certainly the output format is inferior to my
newsreader.

Anyway, said web host basically has their own paying customers
doing *lots* of their tech support for them simply because we like
the organization.  It's pretty neat, and it has totally eliminated
the need for me to pester anyone who's time would better be
spent doing systems administration, tuning, and planning.

-Tom

<snip>



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