[HPFGU-Feedback] Re: Never mind Tbay, what about FILKS ?

[Shaun Hately]

On 6 Dec 2003 at 11:46, a_reader2003 wrote:

> On the issue of having to pay a lot to download unwanted, and perhaps 
> very long posts, personally, I pay a flat rate of £17.00 (US$26.00?)
> per month (all phone charges included) for continuous 24hour internet 
> access, because I need it for work. There are much cheaper packages 
> available for less heavy users, and many completely free ones. 
> Broadband packages in particular enable very rapid download of even 
> the largest files. It does not seem a huge amount to me, and surely 
> people should accept that joining an Internet-based discussion group 
> will involve some charges of this sort? And they are surely using 
> their Internet connection for a lot of other things as well ?

Where you are this may be a valid option. But please understand that the 
availability and cost of internet access differs markedly in different locations. If I 
wanted 'always on, always available' 24 hours access where I am, I'd be looking 
at roughly $65 Australian a month - that's about $48 US or £28. And I actually live 
in an area where internet access is relatively cheap in world terms.

There are no free packages in my area (people tried setting up a couple, they 
didn't work out).

For some people, internet access still costs a lot of money - please understand 
that just because you have cheap access does not mean the other 11,000 people 
on the list have equal access to cheap services. In fact, on a list with that many 
members, they almost certainly do not. Quite a few are probably using things like 
university services, some of which place significant download limits on people - 
mine does. I don't use it for mailing lists though.

Even if you use a free web based e-mail service - I do for some things - if you're 
on a dial up connection, things like TBAY posts do make life awkward if you're not 
interested in them. I'll explain why.

There's two basic ways of using a web based e-mail service - you can read 
messages by clicking on them on the 'inbox' page read and then go back to the 
inbox page, and read the next message. If you use this method, you can fairly 
easily skip something that has a subject header that you don't like - for example 
TBAY. However, on a dial up connection, a delay of 30 seconds on each click is 
not uncommon (and BTW adds a lot of dead bandwidth for anyone who has to 
pay volume charges) - so click in, read, click out - could easily add a minute to the 
time it takes you to read e-mails. HPFGU gets approximately 60-70 messages a 
day - a person who reads every message in this way, only avoiding say, TBAY, 
could end up wasting a hour a day. Even if the net is running as a decent speed, 
it may be 15 minutes.

The alternative which is a bit quicker is to enter the mail section and use the next 
message button to move through every message. This tends to save both time 
and bandwidth - but it means you can't avoid reading messages you're not 
interested in.

Is any of this a reason to move TBAY? Probably not - but there seem to be a lot of 
people on this list who assume that just because their mail system would make 
filtering TBAY simple, everyone must have access to such systems. That's not 
true. One clear example is anyone receiving the list via digest doesn't get a 
choice in what they download. And people seem to assume that because they live 
in an area with cheap net access, everybody is likely to have such access. And, 
again, that isn't true.
 
> Would it be worth doing a poll to find out if the cost of downloading 
> large, unwanted posts is a big issue for members generally ? This 
> would seem to be a quick and easy fact to establish, and the response 
> may help to take (some !) of the heat out of the argument, although 
> obviously will never persuade those that hate Tbays of their right to 
> exist on the main list.

One *slight* problem with such a poll (-8

Those who have e-mail access only to the net (and there's actually quite a few 
people in that situation - about 10% in most western countries, higher in other 
countries) cannot participate in most internet polls. Those who are concerned 
about download charges or time charges, etc, are less likely to, because it could 
cost them money.
 
> Because of the package I have I choose to read everything online 
> anyway, and I find the The SHIP, TBay, FILK headers etc are fine, and 
> I can see the whole head on the message index, and pick what I want 
> to read. 

And that's fine for you with your package - with mine it would be an absolute 
disaster.


Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at ... | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the 
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that 
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia