mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (05/15/86)
Some significant part of the volume in net.announce has consisted of conference announcements and calls for papers. I've worried a couple of times about this, but when I ran a survey, the readers told me they wanted them to remain in the newsgroup. Then Brian Reid's arbitron statistics came out, showing that 75% of the people on the net have unsubscribed from net.announce. Of course, the only ones voting in my survey were those who are still getting net.announce; those who have unsubscribed due to conference postings (or for any other reason) didn't vote. I propose that we create a new group especially for conference postings - both calls for papers and conference announcements. This newsgroup could be called net.conference. (If the net would prefer mod.conference, this is fine too, although I would prefer someone else be the moderator.) Another possibility is net.research.conference. Once this group is created and in use, I'd like to rename net.announce as mod.announce, which is what it really should be called. I'd also like to encourage people to NOT unsubscribe to mod.announce. Other than modifying readnews, rn, and vnews to force people to subscribe, I'd be interested in ideas. For example, we might have two groups: one for routing announcements (other than conferences) such as net.announce has had, and another one, say mod.must-read (better names, anyone?) to be used once or twice a year for really critical things for everobody. Followup discussion in net.news.group, please. If you're just voting, please mail the vote directly to me. Mark Horton