Effects of Marking/Delaying Nonsigned Posts

At 12:34 AM 11/30/94, Eric Hughes wrote:

>Does a mark or a delay constitute an "effective bar" from
>participation on this list?  I think not, although I'm entertaining
>arguments.

I don't think marking or delaying constitutes an effective bar
from the list.

I do think that marks are redundant (as Tim said, it is pretty
obvious who signs and who doesn't), and that delays will degrade
the quality of discussion on the list (time lag for only some has
a way fragmenting discussion, as anyone with a sometimes-slow link
can attest). Degrading the list value, I would think, not your
intended goal and would punish the rest of the list members for a
non-signer's sins, so to speak. This, of course, depends on the
lag - 5 minutes won't matter, but why bother? 1 day would (IMHO)
kill quite a bit of discussion. Somewhere in between (the 2-4 hours
you mentioned in one post) could head either way.

If you are set on this idea, may I echo someone else's suggestion
of an autoresponder to annoy those posting without signing? Doesn't
impact the list, we all still know who is not signing, and the culprit
gets to delete a message informing them of where to find the latest
version of PGP.

>Eric

-j

From: jamiel@sybase.com (Jamie Lawrence)

   [...] delays will degrade
   the quality of discussion on the list (time lag for only some has
   a way fragmenting discussion, as anyone with a sometimes-slow link
   can attest).

If the delays remained entirely unexpected or random, quality would
degrade.  Humans, however, have an uncanny ability to modify their
own behavior.

I am also willing to risk a small amount of degradation to encourage
people to actually use encryption tools.

   If you are set on this idea, may I echo someone else's suggestion
   of an autoresponder to annoy those posting without signing? 

I think this is a good idea which will help the communication intent
of the whole proposal.

   [...] we all still know who is not signing [...]

Having notification that a message wasn't signed was never presented
as one of the purposes of the proposal.

Eric