Subject: Re: Usefor/usepro conflicts.

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:06:54 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

I'm fascinated by a web page that contains explicit mailto links for
deliberately invalid email addresses.

>OK, I now have:

>   A "poster" is the person or software that composes a possibly
>   compliant article for submission to a posting agent. The poster is
>   synonymous with [RFC 2822]'s author.

Nope. Wrong action.

>> The word in standard usage
>>implies "the person who posts", which is different than "the person who
>>writes", so as a synonym, it belongs to "sender".

>But the term as widely used throughout Usenet is as I have defined it.

No. It may appear that way since USUALLY the person who writes the article
is then the one that posts it, but the action of posting is clearly
different than the action of writing, and the term "poster" means "one who
posts", not "one who writes". When someone refers to the "original
poster", they are correct, in most cases, only because the "original
author" and "original poster" are the same person. I cannot speak for most
people, but I expect that most people are able to differentiate the
actions, but are simply loose in their usage of the term. This does not
mean we ought to be.

In fact, I think it would remove confusion were we to use the terms both
as they are defined in simple engish and to isolate the actions of
authoring and posting. For example, it makes the concept of "what happens
in a moderated group" much clearer. It also makes the idea of what a 
"posting agent" does clearer. A "posting agent" need not be a text editor,
only something that can take the result of a text editor and assist in
posting it.