At 10:19 PM 3 09 96 -0400, brandon zylstra wrote:
i'm not denying that this would be a difficult project, just that
reforming the entire internet community would be far harder, especially
A much more obtrusive method, but perhaps more effective (as far as changing
behavior goes), would be to do something based on the number of response
lines in the message. It's people's lack of editing that we're trying to
work-around with this signature stuff, why not attack the problem directly
rather than focus on one of it's side-effects.
A fairly high percentage of responses are demarcated with ">" or "> ". Thus
a heurisitc like "if the message is more than 15 lines long and more than
2/3 of those lines are new response lines, then send back a message to the
author telling him/her to edit his/her responses better." I think some
newsreaders have already implemented something along these lines.
Dan