En réponse à Costentin Cornomorus :
>Mais non! I certainly don't want you out - but
>can you not delete?
I takes me just as much time as reading, so why bother?
>There are some other minor aspects to this seive,
>but that should be a good overview. In this way,
>I end up reading about 40 - 60% of the total
>volume. Much of that is skimming. So, I could
>easily handle it if John set the limit at 400!
>;))))
I used to do that. It took me just as much time as reading the posts one by
one, and then afterwards I still hadn't read the ones I kept. No use...
>That's a possibility. But then, I figure that if
>someone really wants to get MY attention, they
>can write "ATTN: CONSTANTINE C.!!" in the subject
>or else write a private email. Otherwise, if
>they're responding to something I wrote already;
>chances are close to 1 that I'll look at a
>message with a familiar subject.
I don't pay much attention to subject lines, because they often have little
to do with contents. So I can't use my memory of them to choose what to delete.
>How so? Reading 50% of the list's messages should
>take about half the time of reading all the
>messages! ;)
But erasing them beforehand takes so much time that no time is saved.
>Sure. IF the limit were 400 (and if we ever
>generated 400 messages in a day!), it would take
>me the same amount of time to pare down to and
>read 100 messages as it now takes you to read
>every single message generated on a busy day.
But it would take me 4 times more time if I just read the posts, and 8
times more time if I first skimmed through them to delete them.
>Amie! I have experience in it, too, and it works
>fine!
For you maybe. But other people will have to cope with the consequences of
the raising the daily limit, and I for one wouldn't be able to handle more
posts than 100 a day, whatever the method of reading.
> I used to read everything in this list (and
>a few others, plus NGs). It's been a while since
>I figured that a large percentage of those
>messages just weren't relevant or interesting to
>me.
Indeed, but my experience is that it's not something you can guess from
message titles.
>Me I would rather take the risk of missing out on
>an interesting gem or three via deletion than the
>leave the list entirely, and therefore miss ALL
>of them!
Well, that's your way. Mine is different.
>Maybe we just have different reading styles or
>speeds. It takes less than a minute to go through
>a hundred titles.
I can't imagine how you do that! If I try doing such a thing, I end up
scrolling the mails so quickly I don't have enough time to even read their
titles, let alone push the delete button!
> First of all, I keep in mind
>the threads I was interested in from last time -
>so will keep those. If I delete one message, it
>takes no thought at all to delete all the others
>in the same thread.
I don't have that kind of memory. Moreover, threads evolve so quickly on
this list that thread titles are not a good parameter to decide whether a
post is interesting or not. Since moreover most posts are just a few lines
long, it takes just a few second to read them, just as long as it takes to
decide to delete them or not. There's just no point in doubling the effort
for nothing.
>Is for me! Obviously, for those of us that read
>every single message, perhaps raising the limit
>were not so good an idea.
Indeed. And I feel even people who delete entire threads can hardly cope
with more traffic than there is now.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.