Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 07:00:15 -0500
From: Kit Mason <kit at hers.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: message length policy
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

ronkean at juno.com wrote:
>
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002 15:20:41 -0500 (EST) "Keith F. Lynch"
> <kfl at keithlynch.net> writes:
>
> > This is WSFA's list, not my list, so what do all of you think?
> > Should
> > I block all messages of more than a certain size?  If so, what
> > size?
> > Mine was 16k.  The longest message before today was 11k.
>
> Instead of blocking long messages, could you just snip them to a certain
> length?  If you did that, it would encourage top posting (for short
> answers), and it would encourage economy for longer, interleaved,
> answers.  I think a 4K limit would combat archive bloat.

I vote no snippage, no editing, no length limit.  Period.  WSFA is one
of the few places I have found where one can express an uncensored
opinion and have it respected -- not necessarily agreed with, but
respected.  Why change this with arbitrary length limits?

I doubt everyone will post reams of text every day, and the occasional
larger post will not stretch any archive.  If anything needs to be
deleted for space, the piffle (posts about online personality tests,
etc.) can go first since it's generally out of date within a year or
so.  Besides, nobody is going to like having someone else edit their
discussions, or automatically truncate them so that they end in mid-

sentence and the reader ends up missing the point.

(sentence purposely cut for effect)

The restriction of no HTML alone should cut down on bandwidth
sufficiently.

Kit

--

kit at hers.com
Kit's Concatenation:  http://concatenation.blogspot.com/
A Twist of Wry --  http://www.mrks.org/~kit/index.html
Kit's Works -- http://www.kitsworks.com/stories/index.htm

"Don't you know by now that Nietzschians hold the truth in high regard?
So high,
in fact, that we're extremely cautious about how it's employed." -- Tyr
Anasazi