[ih] what is and isn't the web, was Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[John R. Levine]

> We always need to make sure that the perfect isn't the enemy...
>
> If a big guy with a beard and cigar shows up wearing a girl scout uniform, 
> he's not going to be let through...

Hm, that may explain why my troop always had poor sales numbers.

In any event, as I hardly need tell you, one of the most persistent Well 
Known Bad Ideas (WKBI) is to stop spam with a walled garden, where the 
people inside are all nice and the spammers are all locked out.

Now you've replaced the spam problem with the introduction problem, who to 
let in, which is even more intractable than the spam problem.  It soon 
leads to the observation that any community large enough to be interesting 
is large enough to have people who you don't want.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly