Aucbvax.4065 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Sat Sep 26 11:34:20 1981 Digests >From lauren@UCLA-Security Sat Sep 26 11:19:24 1981 The primary reason for digestifying a list is not to censor messages or even to control content, but simply to prevent the entire "system" from breaking down when message traffic starts getting very high. There are two primary forms of "breakdown": 1) Many users, who often have much to contribute to the dicussion, find themselves being bombarded with separate messages throughout the day, which can be very distracting. These people tend to drop off the list, and the loss of their input can be expensive to the list at large. 2) The networks and supporting computers begin to have problems when load starts to get high. It is much more costly (in terms of machine time) to deliver lots of separate messages to a given site than an occasional big message. As lists begin to get very large (Unix-Wizards may not have reached this point yet) this issue gets very important. This problem affects not only the machine distributing the digest, but every machine which receives the digest. It is not unknown for a site administrator to "disallow" the reception of certain lists when load starts to become a problem (from lots of separate messages). Digests have some very good features, one of which is that similar questions and comments can be clumped together in an orderly fashion -- this has served well in most other digests, including WORK-S, which started out in direct distribution mode. Digests have some bad features, the most notable is that it is more difficult to use automatic reply mechanisms (on most sites) to reply to a particlar digest message. There is work being done in this area, and in fact Roger Duffey (net mailing list guru supreme) and I discussed some of these problems when I was in Boston a few days ago. Perhaps Roger could comment further on the issues of digests as they relate to growing mailing lists. --Lauren-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.