From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Oct 10 2:36:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from compass.OregonVOS.net (compass.oregonvos.net [159.121.170.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DFAA1154DD for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 02:36:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from th@huppi.com) Received: from sis.huppih.com (ppp1-ast.orednet.org [159.121.170.200]) by compass.OregonVOS.net (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id CAA19947; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 02:33:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (th@localhost) by sis.huppih.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA22924; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 02:39:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from th@huppi.com) X-Authentication-Warning: sis.huppih.com: th owned process doing -bs Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 02:39:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Huppi X-Sender: th@sis.huppih.com Reply-To: Tom Huppi To: "Paul M. Lambert" Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Roasting Newbies In-Reply-To: <19991009211015.A736@pinky.magiclemurs.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message