Date   : Sun, 18 Feb 1990 12:02:00 EST
From   : "No, me?" <JSHIN%HAMPVMS.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: Binary posting on discussion lists....

Hello...

This is in response to Richard Loken (did I spell it right?  If not,
thousand apologies...)'s question regarding binary source posting.

As far as I know, the way these discussion groups work is that when
one sends a message to the group's "base," the base cc's the message
to all of the members (hence the name "list").  Often, as is the
case with info-cpm (or comp.source.cpm, or something like that as
you call it), the groups bases are located in an internet site or
a uunet site (or whatever else have you), which makes it inconvenienet
to forward ALL of the messages through the gateways over into
other networks (over 10 per day, depending on the group), especially
BITNET.

Now, I would imagine that most source codes, UUencoded and what not,
would be far greater than 10 kilobytes.  Just imagin hundreds and
thousands of copies of these flooding across ALL of the nets possibly
imaginable.

Also, let's consider the fact that most of the gateway'ed messages
are "digested" into a bundle of more than one - I've seen one from
dist-ibmpc that was about 30 messages long - messages.  Since
the digests are organized alphabetically, the source is bound
to be stuck somewhere in the middle of the digest.  For some mailer
programs, you have to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of it until
you get to the next message.  No way skipping.

Now, let us consider some of us, like me, who are still struggling with
a 300-baud (or even 1200-baud) modem all the way through the pages-long
source code just to get to the next message, whose content one knows
only vaguely through the often uninformative subject lines.

Would this convince you of the impropriety of source posting?

Instead, you can just post a message asking if people want the source,
and if they reply, send the source.

Maybe, just maybe, this IS what you meant by  "source posting."

In that case, this message is misdirected.... I'm sorry.

I'm also sorry that this message was so long.  I imagine this
would be the last of this sort, but first on the digest (starts with "B").

Thanks.....

                    John
P.S.  at least I don't use lines-long signatures... :-)