From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b0fec7122c9f5214 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: CFPs, conference announcements Date: 1996/02/21 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 140573049 references: <9602211404.AA01089@eight-ball> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-02-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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?