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Subject: 
Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.nntp
Date: 
Tue, 6 Mar 2001 00:18:52 GMT
Viewed: 
1601 times
  
Todd Lehman wrote:
I don't think it can still be true that auctions are frowned upon in the
same way that they once were, and I'm challenging the notion that they
necessarily need to be separated from straight sales.

Basically my idea was that .swap was for all the small time relatively
informal deals, be they straight sales, trade offers, or even
mini-auctions.

Oh, see, to me "swap" means trading -- LEGO for LEGO -- maybe with money to
round it out.  We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of "swap"
versus "barter" in a thread a couple months ago and came to the conclusion
that "swap" was closer to the intented use than "barter" was.

Yea, that is a problem with using "swap", I guess one factor for me in
not breaking it down too much is that while a number of offers are
clearly auctions, there are just a few which are pretty strictly trades,
and everything else is somewhere in the middle. Most offers allow some
room for negotiation, and when one is presented with a bunch of offers
in one's in box, I'm inclined to take the best one (unless I've very
specifically stated that the first request in my inbox will be taken,
but then I'll never make such an offer, I prefer the wiggle room of
being able to take an equal offer from someone I've dealt with before
that arrived one second later). Heck, even for the "only available for
trade" sets which I have available, if you offer me the right amount of
money, I'll sell.

I'd hate to not be able to respond to someone who despaerately
wanted some set which happened to be a real bargain over on some little
known auction site (or even on eBay).

No problem -- just post your reply into the .auction group, dropping the
group it was asked in.  Then FLOG AWAY there with reckless abandon!  :-)

I guess one issue is what if the person wanting the item never looks in
.auction because from their perspective, they can never find anything
interesting?

From another perspective - for how much longer will our
compartmentalized dorkdom actually matter for replies... As more and
more folks use the web interface, they will see all replies to their
post no matter what group they are in (barring filtering - does that
apply to the reply tree yet?).

If one is expected to not reply to
the group about auctions, I'd even more expect that privately e-mailing
the person about such and such an auction has the item they want would
be even more frowned upon.

Hmm, why would that be frowned upon?  That would be totally awesome!  If
someone publicly posts that they're looking for something and someone
responds saying they've got it for sale via auction, that's absolutely
perfect (assuming of course that the person asking didn't say they didn't
want email replies).

But if we've got people who are going to go ballistic because they even
see a hint that auctions exist...

Let's step back and examine exactly why we need to treat auctions
differently.

I'm not so sure anymore that we do, except for separation in a forsale area.

There appears to be this fear constantly bandied about that
someone will leave Lugnet because they happen to hear about an auction.

Not leave (gosh, that would be pretty extreme), but have a less-fun time.

Well, I think if the guidelines limited the way the reference could be
given (I think primarily that it should be low key) as below, that it
won't be too bad. Again, are we really worried about people seeding
requests?

I guess I'm concerned about line-toeing more than seeding, because it's more
obvious and it creates hurt feelings.  Of course, the two can be combined.

I guess. I have to say I'm pretty divided on debate issues. I think a
certain amount of debate is good in the theme areas, but as soon as it
starts to get "nasty" (as mentioned in another post), or starts to
broaden or stray, I think it definitely needs to be moved. Given the
difficulty of moving threads once they get well underway, I would prefer
policies which moved debates to a .debate group (whether it be a single
one or a LEGO related one and a totally non-LEGO related one), earlier
rather than later.

OK, noting that for inclusion in the upcoming T&C draft revision.

Oh no... how will I keep track of which articles I have yet to read to
process into my mega links pages...

Say again?

That's my concern for keeping nntp
access somehow is that I have certain articles bookmarked currently by
keeping them marked unread. If they are made no longer available by
nntp, they're gone. I guess I've been taking advantage of Lugnet's not
flushing them. I wish there was a way to more easily generate web URLs
from the newsreader, that is one of the things which slows down my
indexing (another one for anyone who might be watching is not preceding
your URL with an http://, the newsreaders I use only create a clickable
link if the http:// is present - if it isn't,  I need to do something to
get another browser window open, then cut and paste your URL in, after
first remembering to clear the URL field in Netscape on Unix here at
work...).

OK, what are you using to read news?  Is your concern about losing articles
in NNTP related to getting caught up in places you're behind?  That expiring
old articles would make it hard for you to get at them to get caught up?

I do the bulk of my news reading using NNTP. My links pages have been
meticulously built up by reading EVERY post in .castle and .pirates. The
really neat posts got processed as they came in, but some threads get
left for later processing, but I like to eventually index everything.

I don't know if I'll ever index all of lugnet.general. Heck, I probably
won't even get caught up with lugnet.trains. Who knows about
lugnet.space...

The nice thing is that I'm starting to see other folks linking to my
links pages. There's nothing like knowing people are using the fruits of
your labor. I just wish someone else would step up for some of the other
big themes (I should get caught up with some of the slower themes like
Wild West and Adventurers).

--
Frank Filz

-----------------------------
Work: mailto:ffilz@us.ibm.com (business only please)
Home: mailto:ffilz@mindspring.com



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
 
(...) To the best of my knowledge, yes. LEGO Shop at Home (both online and offline) is still run by Steven Hawco, who started it some 15 years ago. Steven Hawco reports to Brad Justus. (...) No...(more below)... (...) Oh, see, to me "swap" means (...) (24 years ago, 5-Mar-01, to lugnet.admin.nntp)

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