From: fortony@sonne.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud
Subject: Re: If a Mu* is down, Dont panic so quickly
Date: 28 Jul 92 17:36:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: murphy.fortony.712344966
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Originator: fortony@murphy

Wendell G. Wren <WENDELL@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> writes:

>[I, Felix, write:]
>>
>>Or, phrased with reality in mind, "would you rather get 50 stupid letters
>>or see it 50 times on usenet?"

>   While I'd hope those who saw one posting asking about their favorite
>   but downed Mud would refrain from posting again, it is a vain hope...
>   probably because they whine first, and *then* go see if anyone knows
>   what happened...

It's worse than that, Wendell.  News can take days to propagate across
the network.  This means that if a MUD has a policy including "post to
the net if the mud goes down," it's likely that very many people will
consider it their God's Honest Duty and flood newsgroups I read with 
their mewling.

>>Look, fella.  It's not what *you* would rather have, but what the net
>>would rather have.  USENET is read by hundreds of thousands of people
>>daily.  You're not allowed to inconvenience them just because you can't
>>deal with the stress of getting a few pieces of mail.

>   It's not at all inconvenient to skip over queries of why xxxMUD is
>   down...   much easier for me/us to ignore queries about Muds we don't
>   play than for that administrator to sort through multiple mail files.

You're undergoing two forms of confusion here.  Firstly, I have yet to
be able to construct a satisfactory kill file that gets rid of all these
"Where's BazookaMud?" posts while not killing actually relevant subjects.
As one of the writers of the FAQ, I feel a probably misplaced responsibility
to inform, educate and enlighten.  As such, "Where's" or "what happened"
are not killable.

Your second form of confusion is the impact that posts have on the net.
Let's assume that each post is a thousand bytes (a very very low estimate).
If the mythical fifty people post, that's 50k.  Multiplied by the network,
which has, as an utterly unsupported guess, 10,000 news spooling machines,
we're talking 50,000 x 10,000 completely wasted bytes of disk space.

In reality, most posts by people wondering where their favorite mud is
are longer than 1k by .signature length alone.

Such a waste is inexcusable when it can be limited to 50k in *one person's
mail spool*, especially when that one person is theoretically responsible
and is in fact the only person who can do anything about it.

>>
>>If you can't handle the cluelessness of your players, then I suggest that
>>you do something better with your time than administrate a MUD.  Or maybe,
>>just maybe, you should put a note in your MUD news system to the effect
>>that nobody should ask dumb questions until at least ten days have gone by,

>   Do you *really* expect people not to ask no matter what might be
>   requested?   C'mon Felix...  you're far more cynical than that...
>   Just think of the inane postings to =paperdnd...

I don't mind the inane postings to =paperdnd because it's a single file
on one computer system which I can ignore.

>>and then only to you rather than the net.  Remember, your laziness is not
>>a valid reason to waste my time and disk space.

>   Look at it from this end...   said administrator need only reply
>   ONCE to these postings, but he would have to reply to ALL mailfiles
>   (assuming he'd waste time doing that instead of fixing the problem),
>   so bandwidth wasted would be 
>   to stupid lettersY versus 
>   From a systems point of view, I prefer this alternative...  course,
>   I'm not Adminstration, so it's not my decision, even if given a choice.

Wendell, you're completely confused.  If 50 people write all over the net
(multiplied, of course, by the [random guess] 200 MUDs there are out there,
you're talking GIGABYTES of disk space and HOURS of newsreading time wasted.
If 50 people write to ONE PERSON, who is the only person to give a damn in
the first place, and he responds to them individually (which I don't think
is strictly necessary), then at most 100K of total disk space is used up,
and *no* wasted time is used by me and others who read the net.

I'm afraid that four seconds of my wasted time per newsreading session weigh
much more heavily in the balance than the laziness of a mud administrator.

>                                       Wendell G. Wren
>                                       Wendell@Maine.Maine.Edu
>                                       01:58:58 Tuesday, 28 Jul 1992
-- 
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Felix Sebastian Ortony	fortony@murphy.gis.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud