Agreed on both counts, but I think this is WHY it is so important to deny him the right to quote. The more "regular"/"veteran" Empeg owners whose content doesn't make it to the copy-list, the less valuable it is to Empeg
owners, and thus they go straight to the source of the content, which is here.

Yes, it's here. And it's IMHO unreadable. Web interfaces suck, and I've been a happy "customer" of Marc's for since he started his service. I can read what's going on in a threaded, offline manner. Not all of us have broadband to the brainstem, so the asynchronous nature of an email interface is useful.

But that's been hashed out before, and yet certain folks see fit to deny those of us who lack the combination of bandwidth and patience that they possess the ability to read their posts on the basis that it will fracture the community.

Do you realize exactly how counterproductive that is? As the number of empeg users increase, the number of users who find the web interface intolerable will reach critical mass and the community will fracture.

As to your comment about copyright, and the digest being "OK", what if Marc's service wasn't a screen scraper, but a digest burster? Would that be permissible?

I think there's a solution, however.

Marc: Would it be possible for each email post to include a link to itself on the BBS?

If so, then imagine that the system operated thus.

Marc's bots scrape the BBS and send out the messages to those of us who prefer reading the discussion by email. Marc also makes his list a broadcast service rather than an active list. Then, if one of us would like to reply, we can simply follow the link to the message on the board, without having to wade through the web interface to find the original message.

Dredd gets his unified community, and the rest of us get our email interface.

(Why this functionality isn't part of the bbs is an open question....)

-Zandr

-Zandr
Mk.I #150