request for advice

[wouter meeussen]

dear Neil & SeqFunners,

as the OEIS gets bigger, the law of diminishing returns inevitably sets in. Most low hanging fruit
is gone.
Time to start worrying about dilution effects and protecting what's already in there. Sure, the
presence of silly seqs doesn't diminish the usefullness of the OEIS *much*, since the search
function will find hits when needed. But, it does diminish the accessibility for offline searches by
downloading a copy of the database (and screening for eq. Generating Functions or recursions).

I suggest you guard the compactness as an asset too.
Alternatively, you might envisage a separate database file for the uned, base, dumb.

As a contributor that once in a while gets a bit of a rebuke from this list for half-cooked or
close-to-raw stuff, I can recommend the screening by peers. If a big load of such sequence
suggestions were to be sent to seq-fan, I think the list moderator would not hesitate long before
doing something drastic.

best regards,

W.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "N. J. A. Sloane" <njas at research.att.com>
To: <se16 at btinternet.com>; <bowerc at usa.net>; <Ray.Chandler at comcast.net>; <pdg at worldofnumbers.com>;
<deutsch at duke.poly.edu>; <seqfan at xyzzy.claranet.de>; <rkg at cpsc.ucalgary.ca>;
<dean at math.ucdavis.edu>; <Antti.Karttunen at iki.fi>; <layman at calvin.math.vt.edu>; <mlb at well.com>;
<j.mccranie at adelphia.net>; <simon.plouffe at sympatico.ca>; <sellersj at math.psu.edu>;
<njas at research.att.com>; <smiley at mazzy.math.uaa.alaska.edu>; <somos at grail.cba.csuohio.edu>;
<ralf at ark.in-berlin.de>; <davidwwilson at comcast.net>; <rgwv at rgwv.com>; <david at research.att.com>;
<djr at nk.ca>; <rsc at swtch.com>; <noe at sspectra.com>; <seqfan at ext.jussieu.fr>
Cc: <njas at research.att.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 6:49 AM
Subject: request for advice


Dear seqfans and editors:

There is a contributor to the OEIS who in the past has sent in some interesting
sequences, but most of his submissions are to my mind not very interesting.

Two or three weeks ago, finding that I was spending all my time
processing his sequences, which were flooding the OEIS,
(there were a huge number of them)
I asked him never to send in further sequences.

I felt that he was trying to make the OEIS look ridiculous.

He has now resumed submissions.  His latest submissions are
of the form:

Numbers n such that n and 2n+1 belong to AXXXXXX.

Of course there is the potential here for 100,000 new
sequences.

Then we can have

Numbers n such that n and 2n-1 belong to AXXXXXX.,

another 100,000, and then

Numbers n such that n and n^2+1 belong to AXXXXXX.,

another 100,000, and so on.

My question is, would you please tell me what I should do?

I will keep track of the number of replies that I get that say,
this is just fine, accept them all
and those that say
enough already, pipe his submissions to /dev/null

Thanks

NJAS