Re: OT can't read posting.

From: Mike Easter (MikeE_at_ster.invalid)
Date: 11/26/04 

Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 17:47:48 GMT

"andy smart"

> No, I'm not taking offence at this discussion (despite Mike Easter's
attempt to introduce a note of aggression into the debate). I agree
with the point that unless my public key is in somebody's possession
then my signing the posts is useless - but the point is that my public
key is available to anybody who does want it. And I agree that only a
small number of people use PGP (in the same way that only a small number
of people use TBird), but personally I think that everybody ought to be
at least familiar with digital signing even if they choose not to use
it.

Actually, I'm not an aggressive kinda guy at all; I would much rather
figger out where people agree so they can start from there, and where
they disagree so that they can 'consolidate' their opinions toward some
kind of workability.

The reason I brought up the 'killfile andy' subject or remedy is because
I've seen these discussions and frustrations develop before -- and the
recourses to the OE users are very paltry or problematic.

I'm also not a 'whiner', so presenting the dilemma of the OE user just
causes glee to those observers who have been frustrated by various MS
attitudes about things, and also frustrated by the 'behaviors' and
conditions of OE which foul up everyone else. But if there's 'interest'
I'll try to describe the problems of the OE user.

Let's take a 'native' OE user, ie one who has no 3rd party app like OE
QuoteFix implemented.

When s/he reads your post, the text part is an attachment. Fine. No
problem; just open up that attachment so the post can be read. Now,
suppose s/he wants to reply to your post. Uh oh, no es posible.
Because they are reading your post in that little attachment file, the
reply functions for citing and attributing don't work. So therein lies
frustration. It is really a lot of trouble to reply to someone whose
posts are inside a text attachment. They have 3 choices, maybe more.
Go to the trouble of artificially constructing a reply, as I have; or
get a different newsreader, which has a lot to recommend it but is
resisted; or just ignore the plan to reply, which is somewhat
frustrating.

Then, let's take a non-native-OE user who has implemented something like
QuoteFix to take care of myriad kinds of non-compliances which OE
manifests so as to get along in a world full of people who are not OE
users. Depending upon the OEQF configuration for reformatting, it is
highly likely that trying to reply to your post will crash QF. So, the
remedy for the OE QF user/poster who wants to read and reply to your
post would be to disable QF, then open up your message properties so the
content can be extracted and artificially manipulated into the reply
with proper attributes and 'fake' citemark. That's what I do.

What we /can/ agree on is that the pgp signing is not really very useful
in typical newsgroups, and that more people should learn the wonderful
values of pgp clear digitial signing, the meaning of trust, and the
value of cryptography and its ramifications. 

-- 
Mike Easter
Quantcast