Klarinet Archive - Posting 000354.txt from 1994/05

From: Kirby Fong <u745%sas.nersc.gov@-----.BITNET>
Subj: Usenet Bulletin Board versus KLARINET
Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 17:54:09 -0400

A couple days ago someone sent KLARINET a query about a Usenet woodwind
bulletin board either in lieu of the KLARINET mailing list or with a gateway
between the two. I have not noticed much traffic on rec.music.classical.per-
forming pertaining to woodwinds, but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.
I also look at rec.music.classical, rec.photo, and rec.gardens and a lot of
computing related bulletin boards. For my taste, the general signal-to-noise
ratio of all of these bulletin boards seems quite low compared to the KLARINET
mailing list. I therefore do not favor the creation of a woodwind bulletin
board or the automatic forwarding of postings between such a board and KLARINET
for the following reasons:
1. I am not convinced such a board will provide me any additional benefit over
the existing KLARINET mailing list. I realize I do not have to subscribe
to any bulletin board I don't want, so this is really not much of a reason.
More subjectively, I find the KLARINET people to be more polite and
civilized than the people congregating around some of the Usenet bulletin
boards I read. There are a lot of gratuitous insults and provocations on
some of the bulletin boards, and I am much less inclined to post anything
there so as to minimize the chance of an unwarranted personal attack.
2. I am not interested in other woodwinds, so diluting clarinet news with
other news means I have to filter out items I don't want to see. I use trn
to thread related news items so the filtering can be relatively quick, but
I do find it too easy to skip items I should have read.
3. Item 2 above could be made worse by flooding of Usenet bulletin boards with
random advertising. Even if KLARINET coexists with a woodwind board, I do
not want any automatic feeds from any Usenet bulletin board into KLARINET.
If I want to read a bulletin board, I can subscribe to it myself and filter
out the ads; I don't want junk mail being fed to the KLARINET list. I also
feel it is unnecessary to automatically post KLARINET messages onto bulltin
boards. I would not be excited about rec.music.classical.performing
automatically receiving mail about other instruments, so I cannot imagine
its readers would welcome copies of all the KLARINET traffic. An occasional

mention there of the existence of KLARINET is all that seems warranted.

Kirby Fong fong@-----.gov