From: sridhar@enuxhb.eas.asu.edu (Sridhar Venkataraman)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: soc.culture.tamil
Date: 15 Apr 92 20:49:13 GMT
Reply-To: sridhar@enuxha.eas.asu.edu (Sridhar Venkataraman)
Followup-To: soc.culture.indian
Organization: Arizona State University, Tempe AZ

balarama@cae.wisc.edu (Prabhu Balaraman) writes on soc.culture.indian:

) Mr Sridhar Venkataraman, I hope you realize that Mr Balaji's posting 
)on the Soc.tamil issue was not a sales pitch for a seperate 
)newsgroup, but rather an attempt to expose the double-standards
)and hypocrisy of certain people on the net who are idolised
)and whose words are respected as god-sent relevations .

Please don't construe me as a supporter of one person's ideas or the other
from my posting. That I was not I meant. As a reader of several groups
related to this issue (news.groups, s.c.s-l,s.c.i) I have my own
reservations about this proposal (especially its origins in s.c.i and
s.c.s-l). 

Everyone says SCI has lots of junk. Why? Does anybody realise who is
to blame for this? To cite some examples.

1. Day in and day out I see posts from numerous posts from
Universities which are the target of those looking fors. Can't a kind
email to one of the posters in that University fetch you a good reply
rather than wasting the bandwidth and earning SCI the junk status?
Mind you that is not the only way. I did my bit of solving things for
locating folks at ASU by sending in an entry to List of Email
addresses  (on soc.net-people) which has just reduced the finding time 
to a minute. (Logon as netfind on bruno.cs.colorado.edu to find out how). 
How many bother to contribute such things?

2. Some stupid folks mindless of the fact that Usenet (except
misc.forsale groups) is not for sale postings post them. This is
downright abuse of Usenet as well as amounts to clutter.

3. Why don't posters spend sometime reading their own newsreader's
manual pages and ofcourse news.announce.newusers to learn how a
newsreader functions or what they are supposed to do when posting to
several groups. 
The foll. is worthy to note.

a. Posting several groups but not setting Followup header to a
specific group with the result that all crossposted groups get the
followup clutter. Case in point: puzzles, cricket, music etc. And
since the cricket and music groups are well publicised now, I see no
reason why they should be posted to SCI.

b. Posting to a world distribution when a posting locally or a particular
state or country would suffice.

c. Posting to an irrelevant group. 

4. Why don't experienced posters explain to their friends in the same
University what they have learnt? I am sure this could solve a lot of
resource discovery and newuser problems that SCI faces. 

5. And when someone posts to find out the addresses of all Indian
Student Associations and even went to the extent of promising to post
a summary very few bothered to reply. Why? 

I have avoided all other subjects bcos it will only amount to flames.
If you are reasonable to understand all of the above pl. act to help
out. Otherwise you are only aiding posting of junk on SCI without your
knowledge. 

)-PB

It is not a question of blind opposition or blind support for anyone's
ideas. Since this topic is not even a fortnight old, fortunately I can
stack up postings to provide some reasons about why I feel it is not
worthy of a group. 

Sorry it got so long. But I felt something had to be said. 

Wishing to see a clutterless SCI,
Sridhar.