Re: CC'ing Comments to Newsgroup

In order to make that work...

Perlmonks would need to integrate an NNTP feed. (Not really trivial - sure, Net::NNTP makes part of it easy, but then there's deciding on how/where to store the local copies)
Perlmonks would need to allow the newsgroup to cross-post back. Most sites won't cross-post to an unknown newsgroup. This kinda makes it awkward.

Further, I'm not sure that the newsgroup community would necessarily take kindly to this type of website advertising. It just feels wrong to me.

I don't think most people would complain if you posted to c.l.p.tk a message that said, "I posted a problem at http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?... and was wondering if anyone here had any idea, either. Specifically, the problem is ..." But asking someone to fire up a browser from their newsreader to participate? While I'm sure many (most?) people are willing to do so, demanding it is somewhat presumptuous, IMO. That includes both reading the problem and responding to it. Most people don't take kindly to requests to "reply via email, please" - I don't imagine that "reply via perlmonks" will be taken much better.

For example, I've posted at least three module bug reports via rt.cpan.org that referenced posts on perlmonks, but I never made the reader of the report come to PM to find out the problem - they could if they wanted to see more context, but I tried to keep each message self-contained within their existing context. I've not thought about cross-posting PM messages to newsgroups, although I have to admit that my newsgroup reader is way nicer to type in than this text area box ;-)

Comment on Re: CC'ing Comments to Newsgroup

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Re^2: CC'ing Comments to Newsgroup by rcseege (Pilgrim) on Oct 11, 2005 at 05:08 UTC
You raised some good points, and at the end of the day I really wonder if enough people would find the feature useful enough to merit its inclusion even though I still think it would be handy for me... It's not too difficult to see how this feature could be abused and unnecessarily anger others, though I have to say if given the choice between something that is on topic, but copied from another site, and spam from a drug company, I know what I'd rather see ;-) Still, I think I was considering a more modest capability than what you suggested. If I'm a user asking a question, then by cross-pointing it, I'm implicitly saying that I'm willing to check Perlmonks and the newsgroup for possible responses. I wouldn't expect newsgroup replies to be automatically fed into Perlmonks. A responder is going to either A) Go to Perlmonks to reply, or reply to the newsgroup. I expect that this would not be a common use case. Many come to Perlmonks for a greater signal/noise ratio than they get from newsgroups. I would expect that this might be used more often by individuals who create a response to a question that they feel is worth the trouble of cross posting, because it might deliver value even if some of the context is lost. The cross-poster may even provide the additional context. Not all posts to Perlmonks are responses to questions though... There are nodes posted to snippets, Cool uses, etc that are often standalone. Thanks for the thoughtful response Rob	[reply]

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Re^2: CC'ing Comments to Newsgroup
by rcseege (Pilgrim) on Oct 11, 2005 at 05:08 UTC

You raised some good points, and at the end of the day I really wonder if enough people would find the feature useful enough to merit its inclusion even though I still think it would be handy for me... It's not too difficult to see how this feature could be abused and unnecessarily anger others, though I have to say if given the choice between something that is on topic, but copied from another site, and spam from a drug company, I know what I'd rather see ;-)

Still, I think I was considering a more modest capability than what you suggested. If I'm a user asking a question, then by cross-pointing it, I'm implicitly saying that I'm willing to check Perlmonks and the newsgroup for possible responses. I wouldn't expect newsgroup replies to be automatically fed into Perlmonks. A responder is going to either A) Go to Perlmonks to reply, or reply to the newsgroup. I expect that this would not be a common use case. Many come to Perlmonks for a greater signal/noise ratio than they get from newsgroups.

I would expect that this might be used more often by individuals who create a response to a question that they feel is worth the trouble of cross posting, because it might deliver value even if some of the context is lost. The cross-poster may even provide the additional context. Not all posts to Perlmonks are responses to questions though... There are nodes posted to snippets, Cool uses, etc that are often standalone.

Thanks for the thoughtful response

[reply]