V Green said:
Pretty arrogant attitude.
Do you conduct face-to-face conversations
the same way?
Actually that is exactly how YOU and everyone else would conduct
face-to-face conversations when there are large number of people in the room
with whom you will be having those face-to-face conversations. You talking
to all of them at once is not a conversation but an oration. You would have
to walk up to person A, have your face-to-face conversation, move to person
B and have another, then on to person C, and so on. While you were talking
to person B, then person C, and so on, someone else has been talking to
person A while you were busy with the other persons.
I do NOT configure my NNTP client to continually poll for new messages while
I am reading or answering the posts in a particular newsgroup. I select the
newsgroup, the header list get refreshed once, and then I go looking at the
threads to see which ones in which I will participate. Then I move onto the
next subscribed newsgroup. That means any replies that are made since the
last refresh will not be seen by me until my next visit to the newsgroup. I
could be working a long time on resolving one problem before I get to the
next post but in the meantime there have been replies sitting on the server
to those same posts but from other participants. Doesn't matter if I happen
to duplicate a response since it may be worded differently, provide a
different viewpoint, or supply additional information. I don't have the
luxury of the time to go checking that my reply doesn't happen to duplicate
someone else's.
Due to propagation delays, it is always possible that a respondent won't see
posts submitted earlier by other respondents because those replies haven't
yet been propagated to their NNTP server. However, it is unlikely that
Richard couldn't see Pilot's 2nd post since they are using the same NNTP
server and Richard answered 9 hours later, but I have seen synchronization
problems with Microsoft's NNTP servers (where usually selecting a post says
it is no longer on the server but it is on another in their NNTP host farm).
If you don't have the time to read all the posts
to make sure your response is relevant, then don't reply.
In this case, the number of replies and the depth of the subthreads was not
that great. However, your advice would mean that everyone would have to
wander off wasting time delving into all the subthreads, even those that go
off-topic from the OP. Most of those that regularly participate in the
newsgroups to help others don't have the luxury of wasting all that time to
make a reply. We are reviewing LOTS of posts within a newsgroup and are
likely to be visiting dozens of other newsgroups, too!
You have a luxury that is simply not available to others. Not everyone will
waste their time drilling down through all the subthreads. How do YOU know
the NNTP or webnews-for-dummies server wasn't super slow at the time so that
reading all those replies would take in inordinate amount of time? Answer,
move on, help many instead of just a few. I'd rather provide duplicated
help than waste my time figuring out if I was allowed to help at all
according to your rules. Following your rules, Richard and I would have to
waste our time reading every post in every subthread, even those that
diverge into off-topic subthreads - just like this one!
Remember that the OP said that their host was not network which was
obviously a blatant non-truth. Dial-up *is* being networked, but it was a
best guess that the OP was using analog dial-up for an Internet connection
based only on the mention of losing a telephone line that was dedicated for
that purpose.
