From: randy@ninja.megatek.uucp (Randy Davis)
Newsgroups: rec.motorcycles
Subject: Re: Thanks a pant's full, DoD...
Date: 26 Aug 92 22:11:15 GMT
Reply-To: megatek!randy@uunet.uu.net
Organization: Megatek Corporation, San Diego, California

In article <BtLxBB.CwH@wpi.WPI.EDU> mick@maxine.wpi.edu (Ravi Narayan) writes:
|	responses from the net... quite a few times i have asked
|	questions (pleaded for answers that would've saved my life ;)
|	and waited (and am still waiting) for answers! but then again,
|	the overwhelming response from the net at other times more than
|	made up for that!

  Concerning whether anyone responds to a post or not...

  I guess I'm going to have to point out some things that *should* be
painfully obvious to people who read/use ANY group in netnews.  I'll
start with the basics:

  1) Just because you post an article, does NOT guarantee it goes ANYWHERE.
And, if it *does* get off your site, by some miracle of technology (and most
do, I would be safe in guessing), don't for a second think that it gets
EVERYWHERE you think it should go.

  One of my duties in my job - well, hobbies, is more like it - is the netnews
administrator for my company (we're a medium small R&D and manufacturing
company - about 180 engineers all reading news).  We have been and are for
another three weeks connected directly to one of the most well-connected
systems in the world, sdd.hp.com (a.k.a. hp-sdd - which is always in the
top ten, connectivity-wise, in the lists newsgroup), and *I* don't see all
the articles that get posted to this group.  I watch for certain ones (hell,
I've got a program that watches for me), and, although I might see someone
respond to an article, many times it happens that we *never* receive the
original article, and the log files show that it was never received.

  2) If your article DOES reach everywhere, or even most places you think it
should get, you have no guarantee that anyone reads it.

  At my site, rec.motorcycles runs an average of over 100 articles per day,
with peaks in the 200-300 article range.  For instance, I run a six-day
expire on the group, and we presently have 648 articles that are current.
Unless you have an EXTREMELY interesting subject line, often times a single
article - such as a request for particular information - will get lost in
the noise, ESPECIALLY if no-one responds to it.

  3) and lastly...  If you get everyone or anyone to read it, most of the time
no-one is going to respond to it unless a) they can actually answer a question
and are sure enough about the answer to defend it (I didn't say they are right,
mind you - only that they THINK that they are correct), b) they want to
correct it, or c) they think they can make a funny joke or flame based on it.

  It is often a cascade effect - if you can get one person to respond to an
article (for whatever reason), then more people join the party.  If you word
it in such a way that very few people even read it, and those few that DO read
it don't think they know the answer and can't make a funny based on it, you
aren't going to get any responses, and thus fewer readers.  If that's the
case and you don't receive any responses and it is REAL IMPORTANT to you,
REPOST it with a differently worded Subject and something that they can
flame you about - that's usually a good guarantee to get a response.

  I.e. if you don't get a response, LIVE WITH IT and quit whining unless you
can make a good flame out of it.

Randy Davis                             UUCP: randy@megatek.com
("mean and nasty") ZX-11 #00072 Pilot         megatek!randy@uunet.uu.net
DoD #0013                                     ucsd!megatek!randy