From: WENDELL@MAINE.MAINE.EDU (Wendell G. Wren)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud
Subject: Re: If a Mu* is down, Dont panic so quickly
Date: 29 Jul 92 05:22:09 GMT
 <fortony.712124914@murphy> <1992Jul27.070230.25731@leela.cs.orst.edu>
 <fortony.712256036@murphy> <92210.012807WENDELL@MAINE.MAINE.EDU>
 <fortony.712344966@murphy>
Organization: University of Maine System

>>   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.
   This wasn't confusion so much as inappropriate assumption...  I forget
   than not all systems are created equal..  and I'm too accustomed to
   fullscreen browsing for things like reading these newsgroups..  I've
   never bothered trying to create things like a killfile
>
>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.
   Again, no confusion...  maybe another incorrect assumption though...
   the newsserver here is self-cleaning...  every night he wakes up and
   tosses everything over n days old (usually 7 days), so all things
   come to an end, be they good or not.   Of course,  I'll have to admit
   the load on the networks is pretty crude.
>
>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 we read more than the headers, then you're right...  HOURS would be
   wasted...   but then, if we read more than the headers, who should be
   blamed for the wasted time..?
>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 not even sure why I'm wasting my time arguing for the defense...
   *I* don't think people should be posting the questions here...  (for
   one thing, there's no guarantee the Gods involved even read any
   NewsServer)     but I do think they have a right to post their
   questions here...   yes, they're wasting our (and their) time, but
   then, rec.games.mud is as much a time-waster as the muds themselves
   are...   and before somebody flames me for that statement, is there
   any other reason to play a Mud, other than to waste time (albeit
   hopefully enjoyably)?  and so, we read this newsgroup in an effort
   to find yet more ways to waste our time...

                                       Wendell G. Wren
                                       Wendell@Maine.Maine.Edu
                                       01:57:39 Wednesday, 29 Jul 1992
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud,rec.games.misc,rec.games.admin