"l, not -l" writes:

On 17-Mar-2009, "bowcan" wrote:

Because "here" is pretty much a dead end; the vast majority of the
online pen community find FPN, PenTrace and Zoss to be superior. This
newsgroup was never especially active or important to the hobby; but,
Frank Dubiel kept it useful until his death. Most folks who come here
with questions do so because it is the first thing they stumble upon
and it does them a disservice to keep them in this back-water rather
than send them to one or more of the major communication hubs of our
hobby.

And it does the community a disservice to purposefully try to shun a
particular form of communication. This forum is plenty useful, and would
be more useful still if people wouldn't believe that the party is
somewhere else. The party is where you make it.

Now, the most useless and detrimental thing I think one can do here is
to suggest that everyone head elsewhere for their information,
especially after claiming that their question is answered somewher
else. If they know that the answer lies somewhere else, they could link
to it here so that the rest of use could see the information directly.
Better yet, they could quote the relevant parts with proper attribution
and we wouldn't have to go to the original site if we didn't need to.
This would let some of us avoid clunky web forums and would promote more
free information flow within the community.

Some of us monitor this group simply from inertia; others, because they
are unwelcome in the main venues.

And others still, because they actually want to be able to get their
information through Usenet, rather than from some clunky web forum.
--
Aaron W. Hsu | http://www.sacrideo.us
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat
+++++++++++++++ ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) ++++++++++++++