mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/19/85)
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what stargate and moderated newsgroups hope to accomplish. I hope to clear some of this misunderstanding up here. There are two basic goals: (1) higher quality news [with the repeats, mistakes, and the like filtered out or moved to the appropriate place], and (2) lower phone bills. Personally, I'm not concerned about phone bills. Our bills on cbosgd are within what is considered reasonable here. I suspect this is true of a lot of the net - I have not gotten any flak from backbone sites saying that they are having trouble with their phone bills or that they are looking for a way to cut them. (If administrators on backbone sites would care to send me mail telling what their situation is, or to post it here, I'd be happy to hear.) The sites having phone bill problems right now seem to be the secondary hub sites - typically these are the single machine in a city that gets all the news and passes it along to everybody else locally. For example, hasmed in Cincinnati only gets a fraction of the groups because they can't afford the phone bills for everything. I think this is true of mcvax in Europe as well. These places have already cut back because they have to. As traffic continues to grow, more newsgroups are cut out. My problem is that there are a lot of newsgroups I would really like to read, but I simply don't have the time. net.unix-wizards, net.micro, the various Apple MacIntosh newsgroups. There is some good stuff in there, but there's so much junk that I can't plow through it all. Software doesn't do the job - a lot of the junk is original postings that won't be caught by even a keyword matcher. I would LOVE to see a moderated version of some of these high volume but interesting groups. The existence of moderated groups, simply for quality reasons, does not preclude having the unmoderated groups around as well. As long as the backbone sites are willing to pay the phone bills, or as long as somebody will step in as a backbone when one has to bail out, the net.all groups will continue to exist. Many individual sites may choose not to get them, but they should be available on the backbone. The cost cutting goal is so that secondary machines, and others that are having phone bill problems, can choose to get only moderated groups, or only stargate groups. Since the choice for these sites is between getting some news and getting none, it's clear that the existence of moderated groups isn't hurting anybody there. The lack of moderated groups may cause these sites to delay dropping off a bit longer (since they won't have any alternative to getting everything) but it won't keep them on for long. People are concerned that ALL newsgroups will be moderated, and that it will be possible to squelch all news about a certain topic if the moderators want to keep the public in the dark. I don't see this happening. For one thing, it's very unlikely that all the unmoderated newsgroups would go away. If nothing else, there would almost certainly be a net.free-speech where anyone who was turned down elsewhere could post an unmoderated message. (This newsgroup probably couldn't be sent over Stargate, for legal reasons, but if the volume stays low, I assume it would continue to go everywhere via phone lines.) But there are a great many newsgroups which are low in volume and not causing anybody any problems, these newsgroups will probably remain exactly as they are. The future of net.flame, net.politics, net.jokes, and other such high volume newsgroups is unclear to me. I don't read them, so they don't bother me, except when my machine gets bogged down shipping news around, or my filesystems fill up. However, I don't know if there is a way to cut the volume in these down. Perhaps they can become moderated. Perhaps there can be some amount of "bandwidth" that they are allocated each month. Perhaps the current backbone hosts do not mind carrying this traffic. Or perhaps the participants can form their own backbone network, paying their own bills. I leave this up to those who participate in these newsgroups and those who pay the bills. Again, moderators will not be under any central authority (other than the laws about Obscenity, Libel and Slander.) Each moderator will decide what is appropriate for their newsgroup. If there are really more people who want to be moderators than there are newsgroups, elections can be held. However, my experience so far is that being a moderator is hard work, and that few people are willing to do it. I suspect that there will be a shortage of moderators. This implies that someone who feels they are being censored can probably become a moderator of some other newsgroup. It's hard to imagine a person who is being silenced and unable to tell others about it. There are just too many ways to get the word out. Mark Horton
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (01/20/85)
> ... I have not gotten any flak from backbone sites saying > that they are having trouble with their phone bills or that they are > looking for a way to cut them. ... Speaking as the sys admin of a backbone site, I find our phone bills frightening -- and we are 50% of the news feed for Eastern Canada. I am deeply worried, and hope devoutly that Stargate can turn into a "production" system quite soon. Our phone bills keep climbing, and even the current level is much too high. This can't last. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry