Greg,

I'd like to have a group-wide discussion concerning the inclusion of pay-wa
lled articles to sci.space.tech. The worst offender appears to be those tha
t include links to articles in Aviation Week.

Outside of the headline of the article, these postings contain only a link
to an article that is behind a pay-wall. As a non-subscriber to Aviation We
ek, these links do me absolutely no good. In essence because these posts re
quire a subscription in order to be read, and are otherwise devoid of conte
nt, I contend these articles are, in effect, a violation of USENET rules re
garding posting of articles whose sole purpose is to promote the sale of a
commercial product (i.e. spam). It would be different if the posted article
s contained the content of the article, but they do not.

Therefore I question the legitimacy of these postings. Might as well includ
e breakfast cereal ads for all the good they do.

Note that this is *not* the case for those summary articles from Yahoo news
and other sources whose links are not behind pay-walls. I have no issue wi
th those. Overall I laud the intent of trying to make these groups more rel
evant to the readers by including such articles.

But articles pro-offering pay-walled links are not helpful. I suggest they
be removed.

Dave