X-Message-Number: 10607 From: Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 17:48:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Ugly Email In cryomsg #10604, Peter Merel <> wrote: > Keith Lynch, perhaps unknown to you, provides the invaluable > service of archiving the entire assortment of rambles, flames, and > occasional moments of pith. Just why he does this is a mystery to > most of us, but we remain grateful nonetheless; Thanks. Originally I did it because I was trying to figure out whether cryonics was a worthwhile thing to try, and if so, which cryonics organization was best for my needs here on the east coast. To make some sense of the many thousands of Cryonet messages, I indexed them by subject, sender and keyword. So I figured as long as I did that, I might as well put them on the web for others to be able to peruse. That was over three years ago. The number of Cryonet postings has more than doubled since then. The web pages are evidently very popular, having received nearly half a million hits. Over 13,000 in September alone. I have temporarily (?) had to stop indexing them by sender and keyword. (The time I intended to devote to automating and updating this has instead mostly been eaten up making spam reports. Reporting spam (see http://www.clark.net/pub/kfl/spam.html) is my top online priority, since if spam isn't quickly stopped, there soon won't *be* an "online," at least not one which involves two-way communication, or e-mail addresses which aren't kept secret.) The time I *do* spend maintaining and updating the Cryonet archive web pages (http://www.clark.net/pub/les/cryonet/) are largely taken up with reformatting otherwise unreadable messages. I can't just blindly re-wrap them, since quoted text is often run into the reply, and since words are frequently broken in the middle. Anyone who has been skipping recent messages from Thomas.Nord and smithid due to unreadability can read them in my archives. At the moment, my archives are totally up to date (except for the indexing). But they're sometimes up to a week behind. Lately, I've been updating them on Sunday afternoons. > Likewise I'm sure that Keith Lynch bore you no malice when he > suggested you format your posts so that they are legible to others. > He certainly said nothing that was worthy of your harsh response. Right. For one thing, I wrote only to him, not to the whole list, and I was surprised to see his reply, quoting me, on Cryonet. For another, he seems to have misinterpreted my complaint as being at least partly about his English. He also brought up, on Cryonet, the true story of my false imprisonment for a string of buglaries of which I was of course totally innocent (http://www.clark.net/pub/kfl/prison.html). Since he did so, I will briefly answer him here. It happened over twenty years ago, and I have had no further (or previous) conflicts with the law, not even a traffic ticket. I do not believe it reflects ill on me, but only on the justice system here in Virginia, which now has three times the prison population as when I was locked up, and which is now in 2nd only to Texas in number of executions. It's my belief that many of these people are innocent, and my hope that this web page (which gets about 100 hits per month) can save other innocent people from having to go through what I did. I do not waste my time trying to get this conviction reversed, other than to write a short polite letter to each new governor. My suggestion is that KQB's software be highly tolerant of variations in style, syntax, and layout. But that it reject postings that are so grossly misformatted as to be nearly unreadable. This includes postings most of whose lines are more than 80 columns wide, postings where there are frequent breaks in the middle of words, and of course postings in HTML, uuencode, base64, rot13, MIME, languages other than English, and EBCDIC. Please reject them with a short explanation, so the sender can fix it and resend it. I get little fan mail about my archives, but I know they're popular because of the hit count. There are, however, three people who have asked me to remove their postings. I have refused to do so, since I am not Big Brother and will not pretend to alter history. If the complaints become sufficiently vehement, or I get a letter from an attorney, I will take down the entire archives, but I will never bowdlerize them. The one concession I made was to a certain prominent pro-cryonics cryobiologist, the first vowel in whose last name I replaced with a "*", to protect him against web searches from cryonics-hostile cryobiologists. (The "Society for Cryobiology" has bylaws forbidding membership to anyone who supports cryonics. We can be glad that earlier in this century the analogous institutions didn't kick out aeronautical engineers who believed space travel was possible, radio engineers who believed that wireless telephony and television could be made workable, or surgeons who believed organ transplants could be done.) One other suggestion is that senders please try to provide a meaningful subject line. "Re: CryoNet #10571 - #10579" isn't one. (I don't think postings should be rejected for this, however.) Would Cryonet readers (including those who read it only in the archives) prefer that I stop reformatting unreadable messages, and spend that time working on automating the indexing of them by sender and by selected keyword? (There's little point in my also indexing them by subject line as I had originally planned, since so many subject lines aren't meaningful.) Please reply if you have a preferance either way. I hope to continue this archive well into the next century. And if I ever need to be frozen, to have a copy of the archive (along with gigabytes of other material that I've saved in my more than 20 years on the net) frozen along with me. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10607