From: John Eagan <76130.2225@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: ADMIN: Postings to CompuServe (Was Re: TECH: U of I PowerGlove upda
Originator: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: University of Washington
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 20:34:11 GMT



I wrote:

>Jim Brain writes:
>
>>....I appreciate the person who reposts these to Compuserve and the Well
>>(What is the Well), but the person who relayed the info about the
>>posting said that it takes a month to get the posts.  Is there any way I
>>could help speed that up?
>
>Yeah...get me a secretary! :-) (actually that only applies to
>CompuServe...I don't do the relay to the WELL...)

Actually, that's a little too flippant, I should clarify. What I do
with the sci.virtual-worlds posts is not exactly "cross-posting", to
be accurate about this. The forum message slots on CompuServe are of
limited size (I think it's 2k or something, to be honest I don't
remember exactly). As a result I can't "cross post" directly. Besides
the size constraint on individual messages, there's also the
consideration of the finite number of message slots available in the
forum messagebase.  Messages scroll off the board into oblivion, FIFO.
As a result of the above, it's considered bad form to make a habit of
directly copying internet/usenet traffic to the forum messagebase as
it would push aside the normal forum traffic.

Another consideration is that much of the traffic here can bear being
delayed slightly (e.g., conference and seminar announcements that are
posted months in advance, etc.). For things that are more timely (like
Jim's interface project reports, or updates on Rend386, etc.) people
on CompuServe can always put themselves on the sci-vw mailing list,
which a number of people have done, or in some cases (less common),
have internet/usenet access in addition to their CIS account and
simply read the newsgroup directly.

What I do with the sci-vw traffic is: I trim off the lengthy "routing"
headers (it really is astounding how that adds up...I've never really
kept track, but a month's traffic probably involves downloading a
couple hundred KB of nothing but headers!), then weed out stuff that's
somewhat extraneous to those reading on CIS ("FAQ" type stuff, etc.),
and sort it all by date of posting and then collect daily groups and
archive them into weekly-collection ZIP files. They are then uploaded
to the forum library. In essence, it's archiving, not cross-posting,
so I don't make it a high priority in my "chores list", since those
who feel the need to stay right up to date with sci-vw can always do
so via maillist. Having explained this, though, I do plan to make an
effort to cut out some of the piling up of backlog that happens with
this, and get the delay down to a week or two.

******************************************************************
*John Eagan                         "humans is funny critters.." *
*VR section leader                                   -me         *
*Computer Art Forum                                              *
*CompuServe                                                      *
*compuserve:76130,2225                                           *
*internet:76130.2225@compuserve.com                              *
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Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds