CFPs, conference announcements

[Bob Crispen <revbob@EIGHT-BALL.HV.BOEING.COM>]

I don't know if this is possible, but it sure would save me some time
in reading INFO-ADA if we could either (a) prohibit full-length
conference announcements and the like, or (b) post them in special
issues of the INFO-ADA digest.  I'd even settle for a guarantee that
the announcement was the last thing in the digest so I could tell
where to stop reading (and no, you can't tell that from the TOC).

Stop reading?  You bet.  Anyone whose funding permits attendance at more
than one of ten of the conferences whose bloated announcements show up
here has my profound admiration.  And an announcement 1000 lines long
about a conference I can't attend that I have to scroll past to get to
some technical information is scarcely a welcome gift in my mailbox.

Nowadays isn't it really an abuse of the net to post these enormous
announcements and CFPs on USENET and on listservs, now that the Web is
here?  And do the organizers really want to give a first impression
that their conference is kind of low-tech?

VRML '95, for example, was very well attended, and never posted
anything beyond a paragraph or two that pointed to the website where
all the info resided (including registration via HTML form instead of
those silly-looking typewritten ruled lines in USENET postings).

I do appreciate the amount of volunteer work that goes into conferences,
and the desire to get the word out to as many people as possible, but
can't we be a little more up-to-date about it?

Bob Crispen
revbob@eight-ball.hv.boeing.com
Speaking for myself, not my company