Re: CFPs, conference announcements

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Bob Crispen says

"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?"

I strongly disagree. The full length announcements are fine. What is
not fine is the idiotic software you are using that requires you to
scroll through them. Any news reader has the capability of instantly
deleting articles. If the digesting process and the software used
to read these digests is decrepit, then that's unfortunate, and by
all means should be fixed. 

It is not at all an abuse of the net to post these full announcements.
With reasonable software it is trivial to bypass them, and there are a
lot of people who have newsgroup access and do not have acceptable
Web access. Indeed for me, anything less than a T1 line makes the
Web totally useless!

If you have Web access, why on earth aren't you reading CLA with a
decent news reader, instead of using the INFO-ADA digest?