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Re: More on spam



On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 11:24:00AM -0600, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 at 16:07 GMT, Derrick 'dman' Hudson penned:
> > 
snip...

> Besides which, I've had people email me directly regarding archived
> posts before, and I would really much rather they have posted to the
> newsgroup, possibly with a link to the archived posts they were using as
> references.  I'm not really sure why you think it's so important to
> preserve strangers' ability to email me out of the blue about something
> I posted 4 months ago.  I am not a reference material; I am a person who
> occasionally, when I have the time and inclination, tries to help out
> others on public fora.  If someone has a question prompted by a mailing
> list archive, they should direct their question to the mailing list.
> 

Also, I have found that serching the archives, and emailing the poster
of an interesting message is rarely useful to me. Often they have
forgotten what they said and have lost their backup info. Often, when
they remember, they are also aware that their method of solution of a
problem is now out of date.

In general the response "Look in the archives" is quite unhelpful to
a person who is new to Debian GNU/Linux. There are a lot of old
emails that give information that is simply wrong about Debian of
today. The person asking the question has no idea how to select the
good answers.

It is a good thing to use to refresh your memory about a question that
you, yourself, asked a year ago, but have now forgot the answer. (At
least to forgetful me.) But, otherwise, it is a dangerous place to
get current answers to questions for which you have no idea what
form a good answer would take.

But part of openness is public archives. I hesitate recommending that
the archive be closed. That would to too extreme.

Just by $.02.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@peakpeak.com    



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