9fans <-> comp.os.plan9

[Greg Hudson ghudson@mit.edu]

Sorry for the meta-discussion; I'll say one thing about it and shut
up.

> Is the pain of the occasional usenet spam worth the trade-off?  To
> me, most definitely not.

I have three arguments against.

	* I get "the occasional usenet spam" from a bunch of different
	  lists these days, to the point where it's no longer
	  "occasional."

	* 9fans is not a high-traffic list right now, and it has a
	  comparatively good S/N ratio; one or two spam messages a
	  week is enough to damage that.

	* Newsgroups also tend to have a higher level of clueless
	  questions.

Most of the mailing lists I'm on which are gatewayed to usenet groups
have a much lower S/N ratio than they did before the gateway was set
up.  I know that from a technical point of view they're just two
different ways of reading the same stuff, but socially the entrance
barrier to joining a mailing list is a big deal.