I was reading in the bathroom when I ran across an item written by
John Beaderstadt on Sun, 13 Jul 2003 13:09:36
GMT, which said:

OM, each Maxson post seems to generate five from you (I figure you
reply once to each Maxson post, and then get into a one or two-post
exchange with others who respond to either the Maxsons or to you).

Hmm... Let me work the numbers a little bit:

Case 1
1 Maxson post
1 OM reply to Maxson
1 reply to the Maxson post by "Other"
1 OM response to Other, telling him to killfile Maxson

So, killfiling Maxson, alone, cuts the noise by 25%; killfiling OM
cuts it by a further 50%.

Case 2 (OM really does have Maxson killfiled and can't respond
directly)
1 Maxson Post
1 "Other" reply
1 OM response to Other

Killfiling Maxson and OM cuts the noise by ~33%, each.

Case 3 (OM again has Maxson killfiled)
1 Maxson post
2 Other replies
2 OM responses to Other

Here, killfiling Maxson will reduce the noise by 20%, but killfiling
OM, AND OM ALONE, would reduce the noise by 40%.

So, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, OM is solely responsible
for anywhere between 33% and 50% of all noise generated by a single
Maxson post. What's more, OM's percentage rises considerably for
those of us who already have Maxson filtered. In *this* case, OM's
numbers are ~66%, 50% and 50%, respectively, while Maxson is 0%.

So, what would make the most sense by the numbers?


---------------
Beady's Corollary to Occam's Razor: "The likeliest explanation of any phenomenon is almost always the most boring."