full-disclosure - Adminstrivia: Digest Limits/Netiquette

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From: nick at virus-l.demon.co.uk (Nick FitzGerald)
Subject: Adminstrivia: Digest Limits/Netiquette

Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu to me:

> > I'm fully in favour of "quoted-line to new content" ratio moderation. 
<<snip>>
> You do, of course, realize that sometimes a one-line "read THIS url"  suffices?

Yes.

And two counter points:

1.  Seldom is it close to "necessary" to quote great gobs of 
preceding text to "make the point" that a particular URL is the 
answer to all the OP's questions/points/misunderstandings.

2.  I did not suggest 50/50 as an _absolute_ guideline.  Part of 
what I originally said that I snipped above was:

> > or whatever more or less harsh ratio you think is reasonable. 

A "reasonable" standard may be something like:

1.  Starting with just the message body, strip any .sig (say, all 
text on and after a line starting "-- ").

2.  If the remaining text is 7 (10, 15, whatever the moderators 
consider a "reasonable" length for a "small message") stop parsing 
and allow it through.

3.  Apply the quoted to unquoted rule to remaining ("large") messages 
and bounce any that fail.

Now, if we think a little about the next thing I said from the text I 
snipped above:

> > Messages without "substantial" new content relative to quoted
> > content are generally (like 95-99%) not worth the bandwidth,
> > storage space or deletion time they "consume".

we see there are some "intelligent" things the list admins can do 
that to (greatly?) improve the s/n ratio...

> That's when you start seeing
> slash-dot style
> padding that's there
> just to make more
> new lines than original. Now I've got a 50/50 ratio. Barely.

If a quoted/unquoted rule is put in place and the above happens a lot 
then the admins might reasonably decide to simply add a "normalize 
text to 66 char margins" type step before apply the quoting rule.

Anyway, the point of such a "rule" is to prevent the "me too",
"you're ugly", "hey stupid" etc, etc, etc messages that are (usually)
top-posted over an entire copy of a  message that was (often) overly
long and largely worthless in the first place.  Such replies mainly
come to the list because of the morons who don't realize that "reply
all" is something you use on special occasions rather than as your
standard reply option.  Such a "rule" will not prevent the ardent
idiots, intent on being heard regardless, but we have other methods 
(such as end-user filtering) for dealing with them if they become too 
bothersome.

Regards,

Nick FitzGerald