Letters to the Editor

Letter to the Editor: Comments on Fidonews
by Dave Aronson, Sysop of Air 'n Sun, 1:109/120.0

Okay, Chris, you asked a while back for comments on the changes in Fidonews... you got it.

Firstly, something I've always disliked about Fidonews. In fact, I have the same bone to pick with lots of shareware authors who do this in their .doc files. This is an electronic publication, so WHY is it formatted for printing ON PAPER? Gimme plain ASCII text, with no formfeeds or page numbering (tho LINE numbering could be useful!) or other junk that's utterly useless for viewing online. Of all such bogosities, especially, NO LEFT MARGINS!!! This thing is being shipped and stored all over the world, plus there are a gazillion trivial little programs out there to add a left margin (and even to break into pages and number the pages), so why make us ship and store all that useless empty space? Restricting the RIGHT margin to column 70 is fine --that won't force fugly rewrap on most systems, and gives those who WANT to print it out, some room for a margin. But forcing a LEFT margin on us all??? That might even force fugly rewrap on some BBS systems notorious for not liking text over 72 columns wide....

Secondly, this huge conglomeration of stuff that's essentially the same from week to week. Mostly, that's the lists, like of Fidonet compatible software or of web pages about Fidonet. That could be far more efficiently replaced by a list of CHANGES from last week, and maybe a reference to where we could freq a list. (Yes, FREQ, not ftp, or browse a @#$%^&* web page!) Then there's the boilerplate junk at the end. Come on, do we really need all that every week? Again, just give us the bare bones and tell us how to get the whole megillah. To placate those whining "but freqing is sooooo expensive!", perhaps a "docserver" could be setup, whereby someone would email a given name at a given node, and be emailed back a copy of the document, all of which could take place via cheap netmail routing. The latest version of NetMgr claims to be able to do this, and at the moment, I am trying it; send email to "docserv" (w/o quotes) at 1:109/120.0, with subject line including the word(s) "description", "echolist", "gunflyer", and/or "jewishflyer" (again, w/o quotes), to try it out --it should get you one emailed document back per such message.

Thirdly, I dunno about you, but I suspect that the vast majority of even the regular readers have been skipping past the reposted Fidonet Technical Standards. I sure have, aside from an occasional brief skimming of the first couple screens! Stuff like that is why so many call it "da Snooze"! Once again, a summary, plus an announcement of where such things could be freqed or docserved (or, <sigh>, ftped or browsed) would be a lot more efficient. Perhaps instead if someone who has taken the time to read and understand this stuff could post a brief "review" of each of the standards in turn, including their significance to Fidonet's modern operation, IMHO that could be QUITE "newsworthy".

Fourthly, I suggest a new "extension", .LET, specifically for "Letters to the Editor".

Fifthly... where's all the smart folks, er, articles at? B-) Yeah,I know, I know... some more ASCII art is on the way!