difficult e-mail?

[Rod Clark]

> But the point of what Rich & others are saying is that we
> should get away from "one size fits all". No one wants to take
> Pine away from you. ...

Joe, 

   This is the approach that some other freenets take, while
keeping their PPP and non-PPP services equally free and
available to all users. Others see PPP as a revenue opportunity,
and don't provide it to everyone.

   The National Capital Freenet (in Ottawa) has offered free,
limited PPP service to their users since October, 1996. They
offer plain text-only dialup and PPP on the same main phone
number. To do this and keep from clogging up their system, they
block IRC, ICQ and downloading of large file types like avi, zip
and exe over PPP connections with the 60-minute sessions on
their main dialup lines. But they allow fairly complete PPP
usage on another PPP-only phone number with shorter 30-minute
sessions and fewer modems. Their users can also download large
files and use IRC through text-only connections, since these
things don't require PPP.

   Presumably this has been more or less successful, since
they're still doing it. But on the other hand, they have a lot
of volunteers providing help desk support, and they echo the
answers to help desk questions to a public newsgroup. (That
alone would help SCN quite a bit, I think.)

Rod Clark

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
END