Re: [Pan-users] GNKSA

[Beartooth]

On Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:09:56 +0000, Duncan wrote:

> I take it that by groups of groups, you're talking about specific
> (private, special-purpose, like gmane, not generally distributed news
> like USENET in general) news servers.  

        Come to think of it, yes, What any "group of groups" has in 
common is a server. I should've thought of it that way.

> What I read you as trying to say
> is that most users active here have a few of those servers in common,
> and perhaps don't do so much general USENET over regular servers.  And
> from that, you conclude that perhaps we should optimize pan for them,
> not necessarily news in general.

        Yup, that's what I thought -- yesterday.

> If I'm reading you correctly (and it's possible I'm not), I don't
> believe I agree.  First of all, it's a reasonably well known phenomenon
> that most users are "invisible".[...]    There's a
> *LOT* of lurkers out there; our posts really do have an unseen audience
> and affect WAY more people than we might think!)

        Yup; and I shudda thunka that, too. I do have experience with a 
big list (ca. 4000 subscribers in my years), though none so humbling & 
gratifying as yours. What's more, 90+ % of them were Alpha Plus when they 
did break Internet silence.

        That list was work-related; and some institutions had a policy of 
telling their people they were welcome to read, but not to post lest they 
bring down bushels of spam on the heads of sysadmins.

        [snipperoo : stuff good even by Duncan's standards, and 
convincing]

> So I don't believe it's a good idea to optimize pan only for a few
> specific servers plus a few groups on the wider USENET (including
> alt.binaries), because that would cripple pan as a tool that many
> people, not necessarily regular posters here, but pan users
> non-the-less, depend on.

        Yup again. My post was not technically a Schnappsidee, since I 
was sober, as usual; put it down to cranial flatulence. I was wrong, and 
you're right.

        But I do claim the blind hen's occasional grain of corn : we need 
to optimize against the likely abuses of the twenty-teens, whatever we 
can guess of those. 

        Hesitant, second-hand example : I've encountered intelligent 
posters on a wide variety of topics who say they filter out all posts 
from Google Groups. (I don't go near GG, and wouldn't know how to do the 
filtering if I did.) Ought we to take some account (not flat filtering, 
but some more differentiated response) of that source? 

        Better example : are there ways Pan could help with such spam as 
gets past news servers? If I used Alpine as a newsreader, I bet I could 
make filters like the ones I use for Alpine email. 

        And how about links to malware sites? One trick there is to 
install Dillo and make it the default browser. There's a lot it won't do, 
by design; but it's fast, and it usually gives you enough of a look to 
decide if you want to paste a URL into some other browser. Maybe Pan 
could default to using Dillo, and give the user an option to install it 
if need be, or to change the default.

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.