How to slow the animals ...

[Sean Roach]

At 05:00 AM 11/19/96 +0000, The Deviant wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, Ernest Hua wrote:
>
...
>> 3.  Re-order out-going mail (from toad.com) according to size.
>>     Drop messages from queue if it gets "reordered" too many times.
>> 
>
>nononononononono Bad Bad Thing.  If you start doing that, we'll start
>getting replies before messages _even more than we do now_.
I thought so too, at first.  As the long post won't be there to reply to,
replies can't beat the origional post to the e-mail box.

Consider, You replied to a post, until you got this post, you could not
reply to it.  When you got the origional post, most everyone else did as
well.  by delaying long posts, replies would be forced to come later.
However, if a person writes a long argument to a post, and that is delayed,
meantime, someone else writes another response which closely mirrors the
first, you have now doubled the responses.  I may have done so here in fact.
What you say would be true if a message could be put on the "back burner"
after half of the receipients received thier copy.  Then, the remaining half
could get the reply before the post.  I believe I may be suffering from
something similar to this now as my e-mail address is probably near the
bottom of the rolls, due to my subscription being less than a month old.