Hello Nick!
01 Jun 18, Nick Andre wrote to Richard Menedetter:
That is not how things work on this Hub system.
We are not talking about what's going on on your system, we are talking about the effects to the network.
The network means us, the writers. The hubs and nodes supply the infrastructure
but they are not really the network. Without writing users the infrastructure is empty and the nodes don't have content to transport and thus no reason to connect other systems.
Back in the old days that fact was overlied by the transport cost of the call by call modem connects. Less users means less content and reduced costs and there was no shortage of users. This turned by 180° in the current time. Today we have flat rated connects even in germany but many users left to the internet
and there is a shortage of users in fidonet. Any sysop should please take that into account if he judges the impact to the "network" and counterbalance priorities.
Instead, a much more logical, thoughtful and considerate approach is
to judge how the problem is impacting the network as a whole
And in this point we have different jugdements.
You asked why we don't simply use the next key. That is very difficult for me to explain in a translated language but i will try now.
The impact of a misconfigured system posting in a silly low-traffic
Linux echo is different than lets say, a system making a mass-bombing
run or engaging in illegal activity.
Your triggerd three keywords. silly. low-traffic. mass.
Even without detectable emotions in text i would call it an offence against the
users of this echo if in your point of view an/any echo is silly.
I dislike the swedish proverbs in this echo becasue they are useless for me but
i can tolerate them because there seems to be a user having fun working on character translation. Because you are right, this is a low-traffic echo, i don't have any problem to hit these mails with the next key.
To make it understandable why i don't do that with the BBS advertising i have to explain that i'm really pissed off from unwanted advertisings in general. They steal our time by pressing "next" or "delete" buttons, they distract us from our focus and the bytes transfered by the net consumes energy, hardware and human resources worth approx. 6.600.000.000 Euro in germany in 2017 only. (source:
https://de.statista.com/themen/113/online-werbung/ )
One of the primary reasons for my fidonet usage was the non commercial direction and the normally missing advertisment spam.
Now we are at "low-traffic" and "mass". Yes, we haven't seen much traffic here.
That is not a reason to flood an echo with offtopic spam. And what is "mass" for you? The ad subject was seen here on May 22 first (maybe i deleted the first ones) thats 13 days. The traffic 13 days before was 3 mails if we go back
to May 01. Since the 22nd there are ~88 mails now, which is ~2900% more traffic. Compared to the usual traffic your ignoring caused a mass-bombing run.
To add another view to understand my point, we had a user announcing his new and unused chromium dioxide cassettes in the flea.ger echoarea for some weeks and even after reducing the price it was clear to everyone that there is no potential buyer in the echo. The advice that there will be no buyer was ignored
and it escalated into stubborn opposition "i do because i can" and i think the mail posting was given to a bot then. The first announcement was ~2002-06 and it took 190 useless echomails until 2005-11 when his uplink was convinced that ther is no reaction from the seller if anyone asks to buy the cassettes and he killed the cassette announcement in transit.
Maybe it was funny at first, the chromiumdioxide cassettes were some kind of running gag, but then it was annoying only. That case teached me to not ignore a bot.
We (in R24) had perfect the way of ignoring and it does not care. We had a backbone system that wasn't very well maintained by the sysop. It was a bridge to other low maintained "autopilot" systems that had still active writing points. On other systems the echomail distribution paused sometimes until the end of the week, until the sysop came home and pressed the reset button. We kept the broken systems for years and it was annoying if the mail transport paused again for a week. And there was a black hole when the system was forced down permanently. Everybody thought it would be back the next days and it took a while until we realized that it won't. At that point the echomail distribution structure was in shards. It took more weeks to collect the remainings and link them together again. We build dupe links on purpose to have
an activ alternate link so if one system will go down the echomail is comming through the backdoor. Since then we have a really stable echomail supply.
Well, thats all why simply hitting the next button was no good option for me. I
do hate spam, i had bad experience with bots and i don't believe "no action" is
a good solution in case of missing information.
I believe that the basics apply to Richard too. I think we both are what a wordwise translation would be "a burned child shies the fire". Some kind of folk wisdom or common knowledge, the phrase is known be the translator as
"once bitten twice shy" or "one who has been hurt in the past will be doubly careful in the future".
My apologies to all linux interested readers for this long off-topic mail wasting your time but i hope i cleared the question what drives us to request a
temporary disconnect of the advertisment bot out of control.
Best regards
Kai
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.4.7
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