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Subject:ATTN: Digest Subscribers From:"Parks, Beverly L." <parksb -at- HUACHUCA-EMH7 -dot- ARMY -dot- MIL> Date:Fri, 3 May 1996 09:02:00 MST
I'm on a new mail system and many of the techwr-l digests are proving too
large for my mail reader to handle. The bottom 5 to 8 messages of these long
digests are being truncated from my digest. It is an option of the listserve
software to control the size of digests, and I would really like Eric to
make them a bit shorter. (Right now the long ones average about 30
messages).
I don't want nor expect Eric to change the digest size just because one
person is having technical difficulty with it, but shorter digests have
other benefits--benefits to everybody receiving them:
o First of all, instead of receiving one or two monster digests per day,
you would receive three or four smaller digests per day.
o Second, I think many of us would find it more convenient to spend 10
minutes three or four times a day reading through and responding to short
digests, than to spend 30-45 minutes in one chunk of time paging through and
responding to a monster digest.
o Third, sometimes in the monster digests a thread is started and concluded
all in one "sitting" for the digest reader. You basically lose your chance
to make an active contribution while the topic is hot. Shorter digests
would get those messages to you a little quicker and before a topic becomes
"old news."
How the digest size parameters work (to my knowledge, which isn't expert),
is that the listowner can set both a time and a size parameter. For
instance, the listserve software will compile and send a digest when so-many
bytes of data have accumulated, or at a specific time (say midnight),
whichever comes first. If the size parameter is met first, the digest is
sent and a new digest begins to "accumulate."
I would like to see the size of the digests reduced by at least a third, or
even cut in half. Comments?
(I know this will be falling on a lot of deaf ears (blind eyes?) because of
the STC conference next week, but surely there'll be *some* digest readers
still reading their techwr-l mail.)
And for all going to the conference, I hope you have a great time! (But not
a "moving" time, in light of the recent quake.) Wish I was going...
Beverly Parks -- parksb -at- huachuca-emh7 -dot- army -dot- mil
The opinions expressed are my own.
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