29 alt.locksmithing: Why are posts of binaries (pictures) against the consensus rules of this news.group?
Description
This article is from the Locksmithing FAQ, by Joe "Spike" Ilacqua spike@indra.com and Henry Schaffer hes@ncsu.edu, major data collection effort by Scott Anguish sanguish@digifix.com with numerous contributions by others.
29 alt.locksmithing: Why are posts of binaries (pictures) against the consensus rules of this news.group?
This has been discussed a number of times in the past. The consensus of
this news.group agrees with usenet Nettiquette (note that
alt.locksmithing is part of usenet) that the disadvantages of
including binaries in a text news.group outweigh the advantages.
Some of the disadvantages are:
+ A huge post causes other posts to expire faster on the
servers.
+ A huge post seriously impacts download time for those of us
who do bulk-downloads to minimize our connect-time costs.
+ A huge post impacts those of us (and there still are some)
whose connect costs are by-the-byte.
The "Nettiquette" docs are easily found in news.announce.newusers and
among those there is one titled: "How to find the right place to post
(FAQ)" which has a section "Binaries (images, executables, sounds,
etc.)" dealing with this exact question. It says that there are
"binaries" news.group and they "are the only places where you should
ever post a file that is not directly human-readable, such as pictures,
software, or even Microsoft Word files (which are not readable unless you
have a copy of Microsoft Word on your computer.)"
The alternative which has met with the most approval is to put a
picture on a Web page and post the URL in your alt.locksmithing post.
PhotoPoint is a site which offers
free service for this purpose. Another alternative is to post the binary
to alt.pictures or some other binary news.group and mention that.
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