xanthian@zorch.sf-bay.org (Kent Paul Dolan) (11/05/90)
[Kent's revision number may be confusing to those not following the
local discussion in comp.sys.amiga. Revisions 0, 1, and 2 of this
proposal appeared there; this numbering is to be consistent with those
earlier revisions.-eliot]
This is a very, very large (34Kbyte), moderately complex proposal. It is
the result of a month's discussions in comp.sys.amiga, and is now placed
before the net. To simplify reading, it starts with a summary, followed
by a goals statement, followed by some general ranting to short circuit
the many usual CFD discussion problems, followed by the proposal,
followed by discussion of the proposal and related issues with some more
in-depth ranting, followed by my email addresses.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rename comp.sys.amiga to be comp.sys.amiga.misc
Rename comp.sys.amiga.tech to be comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Retain comp.sys.amiga.games
Retain comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Create comp.sys.amiga.announce, moderated
Create comp.sys.amiga.reviews, moderated
Create comp.sys.amiga.introduction, monitored
Create comp.sys.amiga.audio
Create comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Create comp.sys.amiga.multimedia
Create comp.sys.amiga.applications
Create comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Create comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Create comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
Create comp.unix.amiga
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GOALS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroup comp.sys.amiga carries 1000-1200 articles per week. This
volume of news traffic in a single newsgroup causes problems: for sysops
maintaining news software, for such simple tasks as listing the articles
or creating a command line containing the article names, for readers
receiving the group by email, for readers using less sophisticated news
reading software, and for readers trying to keep up with just important
events, or just a subset of the discussions.
The purpose of this proposal is to partition comp.sys.amiga massively,
so that its subgroups are the average size of other USENet newsgroups,
and carry perhaps one tenth the current traffic, organized for easier
subscription and reading.
In addition, to hasten propagation of the change, comp.sys.amiga will be
removed as a newsgroup, and replaced by comp.sys.amiga.misc, to follow
the pattern of other leafy heirarchies. Also, comp.sys.amiga.tech will
be renamed comp.sys.amiga.programmer to divert the current inappropriate
hardware oriented postings back to comp.sys.amiga.hardware.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOILERPLATE RANTING
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those of you who have followed the discussion on comp.sys.amiga have
seen the "why", here's just the "what":
There's a LOT of this, PLEASE read it ALL before posting responses.
THIS IS _NOT_ THE TIME TO VOTE (though I will accept proxies).
PLEASE NOTE AND RESPECT THE FOLLOWUP-TO LINE.
PLEASE USE THIS THREAD SUBJECT WHEN RESPONDING. Hidden discussions
serve no one.
PLEASE BE PATIENT. Formal newsgroup creation methods take time.
Thanks to those who have already emailed/posted many excellent
suggestions. The rest of you too. ;-)
PLEASE EMAIL suggestions to me, post also if of general interest.
LITTLE TIN DICTATOR MODE: sometimes _I_ decide, when that's the only way
to get a decision made.
YOUR SITE IS NOT THE UNIVERSE! Other sites absolutely REQUIRE a split!
COOPERATE!
THIS PARTITION IS BASED ON POSTING REALITY, NOT WISHFUL THINKING!
Don't complain that the traffic shouldn't exist; it does. The only
remaining choice is where to put it.
PLEASE FINISH READING NEWS.GROUPS BEFORE RESPONDING. There will be
several revisions of this call for discussion, make sure you are
answering the current one.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROPOSAL
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
comp.sys.amiga.misc
The c.s.a.* general talk group. Post a multifaceted new thread here in
preference to crossposting. Crossposted articles within the c.s.a.*
groups should use this group as the Followup-To line entry. This group
replaces comp.sys.amiga, which will no longer be a newsgroup, just a
news heirarchy node.
comp.sys.amiga.announce
Moderated: Fred_Fish-disks, meetings, new products, product updates,
shareware releases, uploads to archives, tool bug reports, and other
formal announcements go here. This new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Moderated, archived: where to put your formal reviews of new stuff for
the Amiga: hardware and freeware, shareware, or commercial serious and
game software. This new group will be created. There will be
guidelines for review format.
comp.sys.amiga.introduction
Monitored: This is where neophytes get introduced to the c.s.a.* groups,
and to the Amiga, and where experienced people can read and write
answers to common questions. Frequently asked questions postings, how
to use the c.s.a.* groups, and other standard and slow expiring
postings, also newusers questions and the answers to them from
sympathetic gurus go here. The goal is that all "normal operation"
questions (non-broken hardware, non-buggy software) and answers go here
rather than in the more technical groups. This new group will be
created.
comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Hardware developers', hobbyists', and users' "smell of solder" shop talk
and assistance forum. This existing group is retained, but formal
product reviews are diverted to c.s.a.reviews, and hardware discussions
that formerly landed in c.s.a.tech are directed here.
comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Software developers' and programming hobbyists' "code cobbling" shop
talk and assistance forum. This renames existing group c.s.a.tech to
better focus the desired traffic.
comp.sys.amiga.games
Talking about buying and playing games; casual reviews and discussions
go on here. This existing group is retained, but archival quality games
reviews should go to c.s.a.reviews, "used games for sale" ads should go
to c.s.a..marketplace, and games software design discussions should go
to c.s.a.programmer or rec.games.programmer.
comp.sys.amiga.audio
Music applications, MIDI, synthesized speech, voice input, sampled and
synthesized sound discussions go here. This new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Charts, graphs, screen hacks, ray tracing, using graphics standards on
the Amiga (Renderman, PHIGS, GKS, CGM, Postscript, PIC, X windows), and
other still picture or completely non-serious graphics discussions go
here. Image packaging discussions also belong here or in
c.s.a.datacomm, depending on graphics or data compression focus. This
new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.multimedia
Animations, video, television, and multimedia combinations of them with
graphics and music and speech. The showcase for the Amiga's five years
as the television studio microcomputer multimedia platform of choice.
This new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.applications
The rest of the applications software discussions: business
productivity, desk top publishing, personal finance, TeX, METAFONT,
Postscript, fonts, printer drivers, word processing, utilities, hacks,
etc. Commercial, shareware and freeware non-games, non-multimedia
software applications talk. How to use, how to interface, and so on.
This new group will be created; if there is enough business oriented
material to justify a further split, c.s.a.productivity may be created
later by a separate vote.
comp.sys.amiga.marketplace
Mail order and retail vendor reviews and horror stories, where to find
it, where to get good prices, informal product ratings; talk about
buying and selling stuff for the Amiga.
Personal Amiga hardware and software "for sale" and "wanted" ads go here
too, since it seems impossible to divert people who want an Amiga
oriented audience for their ads into posting them to
misc.forsale.computers. This new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Discussions of the several hardware and software emulations of other
computers (Mac, IBM-PC, Atari, C64, Apple 2 series, and more) that run
on/in (software/hardware emulations, respectively) the Amiga. Includes
discussions of games and applications running only under the emulations,
since they are not of interest to the rest of the Amiga community. This
new group will be created.
comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
The large number of long lasting threads about "here's why the Amiga is
better than Brand W (and vice versa)"; "here's what the other folks are
doing and how the Amiga compares"; "why doesn't the Amiga have this
Brand-X computer feature", "Commodore should add feature Y (at no
additional cost)", "Commodore should recall everything and fix problem
Z", benchmarks comparing Amigas to Amigas and to other platforms;
rumors, (lack of) marketing complaints and suggestions for new ads, and
general "do it better" ranting go here. This _vital_ new newsgroup will
be created, and let me be the first to say: "Take it to .advocacy!
comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
General byte passing and the Amiga. BBS software, terminal emulators
and other modem software ({xpr,}{u,x,y,z}modem, kermit, etc.), ftp,
networking, creating, using, and passing archives (arc, zoo, lharc,
lhwarp, pkazip, compress, uuencode and uudecode, etc.), downloading and
uploading text and binary files, email and news, sharing software and
data, compression methods, archive site pointers, general machine to
machine stuff. DNET, UUCP, PARNET, Ethernet, etc. too. This new group
will be created.
comp.unix.amiga
Amiga Minix and Unix SYSV4 and successors, all Amiga specific aspects will
be discussed here. This new group will be created. Later subdivision is
possible.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCUSSION
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Changes from last proposal.
------------------------------
Many of the descriptions got cleaned up and all got lengthened.
Group c.s.a.market got changed to c.s.a.marketplace to avoid attracting
"marketing" postings, which should go to c.s.a.announce or
c.s.a.advocacy, depending on "officialness" and content.
With the help of yet another return trip to the thesaurus, "influence"
is now c.s.a.advocacy, a name that better captures the "futures",
"compare", "brag", and "ranting" aspects of the group, and should be
unmistakeable in purpose.
The discussion was revised.
2) A little chat about the proposed groups and their names and placement.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
comp.sys.amiga.misc
This is the net standard "chat" subgroup name for groups that have
leafed. By creating this and removing c.s.a as a target for postings,
we force an immediate upgrade across the net; the proposal, once
newgrouped and rmgrouped, can't be "put off for later". This also has
some news software and general tidiness niceness for users; there won't
be a group that contains both articles and directories, so scripts can
be simpler. Post here to reach general c.s.a.* readership, rather than
crossposting to several other subgroups, if at all possible. This will
be a big win for all subscribers. The intention of having so many
subgroups is that this group be small, not large, so that everyone can
afford to read it. Whenever possible, post to a single, more specific
group. If you crosspost to several groups, direct followups to, and
hold the discussion, here.
comp.sys.amiga.announce
This seems highly popular; it will probably be the most read group.
Think of it as the executive summary of c.s.a.*.
comp.sys.amiga.reviews
This seemed highly popular, also. Having it archived should make the
search for information on products easier and faster, and, if we can
educate c.s.a.* subscribers to look there first, cut down on a lot of
postings.
comp.sys.amiga.introduction
This name seems fairly well accepted now, modulo a couple of people
who'd like the shorter .intro. Per my previous plan, I want to use full
English words where no prior standard exists, for the sake of
subscribers in non-English speaking countries. The FAQ postings could
also go to .announce, but I think having them here with the newbie
"help" interaction is best placement, as it gives one group a new user
can explore and inhabit until comfortable with the net.
We are also trying something that may be new on the net, an assigned
newsgroup monitor. Not a moderator, because the moderation overhead
would damp the utility of the group as a question and answer forum.
Just a person assigned to post general behavior notices for the new
folks, send email to suggest individual corrections, and notice when a
question has become "frequently asked" and needs to go in the periodic
postings. We'll try this for a while and see how the group and the
assigned monitor react. Think of it as one person doing newsgroup
post-moderation.
comp.sys.amiga.applications
This name seems popular, again modulo the slow typists. There are a few
calls to split out a business oriented group, but the traffic isn't there
to justify a further split just now. Maybe next year.
comp.sys.amiga.hardware
This should get a little more of its appropriate traffic now that .tech
is renamed and c.s.a is going away. This is one of my favorite groups,
because it is one whose content I rarely read, and I can find the things
I do want to read just by reading the subject lines. While it's
dreadfully unfair to have one hardware group and all these software
groups, the fact of the matter is that the number of folks competent to
hack hardware is much smaller.
comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Renames c.s.a.tech; this should eliminate the stuff appropriate for
ic.s.a.hardware, while still focusing the discussion around software
develop{ers,ment}. This name seems most popular, though ".programming"
has been suggested a couple of times. I think there is precedent in
some other microcomputer groups for the current choice.
comp.sys.amiga.games
My baby! ;-) Needs to propagate a little better to match the current
c.s.a distribution, and I'm trying to get in touch with the
amiga-relay@udel.edu folks to get the relay subdivided, so games stuff
from them doesn't end up in c.s.a; this is another reason to newgroup
c.s.a.misc and nuke c.s.a. Anyway, the current success at damping games
postings to c.s.a shows what a good idea partitioning c.s.a is; there
are lots of people using this group, but also lots joyful _not_ to read
its contents in the main group any more. There are enough ".games
specific" where to buy postings that they go here, rather than in
c.s.a.marketplace.
comp.sys.amiga.marketplace
Name changed again as noted above. The main purpose of the group to be
is an information source about products and vendors, but the main
newsgroup creation discussion will undoubtedly concern the ads.
Some will still suggest using the netwide misc.forsale.computers group,
but 1) no one does, because they want to target an Amiga audience; 2)
this will get the ads out of c.s.a.misc by creating an obvious correct
place to put them, and to read when you want them; 3) there will be a
lot of Amiga specific vendor discussions here. Please DO NOT crosspost
ads to _any_ other newsgroup; that's obnoxious and you'll get flamed,
deservedly. This is not the place for marketing rants, see new group
c.s.a.advocacy.
comp.sys.amiga.audio
Music software, MIDI interfaces, sampled sound, and score sources are a
heavy traffic part of c.s.a; the .audio name was chosen rather than
.music so speech, game noises and other non-music topics would find a
home here too. This group was pulled out of c.s.a.multimedia at the
request of the Amiga Hypermedia mailing list operator, whose more than
100 subscribers would like to participate in a more focused multimedia
group.
comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Ray tracing has become a hot topic, especially with the 68030 boards,
and there is a long running low volume thread about data presentation
graphics. The Amiga's general utility as a graphics machine, and all the
built in graphics coprocessors, make this a long running discussion
area. This group was also pulled out of c.s.a.multimedia at the request
of the Amiga Hypermedia mailing list operator, for the same reason.
comp.sys.amiga.multimedia
The support for separating out the graphics and audio was late arriving,
but when it came, it was overwhelming; there are enough people eager to
participate in this group in just one mailing list to justify the group,
not to mention the heavy ongoing traffic about independent and corporate
hypermedia use of the Amiga. I decided to put the print media stuff in
c.s.a.applications, though; comments?
comp.sys.amiga.emulations
The support for this has grown a lot since the last posting. There are
several who suggested bundling this in with what is now c.s.a.advocacy,
but I'm not going to. Emulation discussions are a legitimate topic of
high value to the folks doing emulations, they are just of limited
interest to the rest ot the group. I don't find it fair to dump the
emulations people into the general ranting of c.s.a.advocacy.
comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Name changed; best one I've found yet, suggestions still welcome; this
beats .compare, .futures, .rumors, .suggest, .influence, and several
other fairly pejorative ideas seen so far. The outbreaks of "why the
Amiga should be a {Mac, PS/2, Atari-tt, NeXT, and so on}" postings are
episodic, as are the real benchmark postings, and the "why Commodore
should add feature X at no additional cost" postings, but when they hit,
they're hell, so let's give them and the "what the Amiga needs to adopt
from new technology" a place here. There's no perfect name but this one
_is_ a grand magnet for the c.s.a.*-specific version of
alt.religion.computers. Notice that at least the benchmarks, and some
of the ad suggestions, are moderately legitimate traffic, and that the
group is justified by the volume of traffic, not by its quality.
comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
A couple of people, a day apart, suggested folding terminal emulators,
Ethernet, DNET, Amiga UUCP, Amiga FIDONET, file archivers, packing
uploads, unpacking downloads, ftp questions, data transfer
({x,y,z}modem, kermit, etc.), and archive site locating threads in one
subgroup; arranged that way, there's plenty of traffic to justify a
separate subgroup. I chose .datacomm instead of .telecomm to reflect
the large data packaging component, when I put the subgroup back into
this proposal.
Henrik Clausen made the excellent point that _every_ USENet subscriber
accessing the net form an Amiga is in some sense interested in this
thread, since that's how the newsgroups are accessed, so it should be in
the current proposed partition.
comp.unix.amiga
The A3000UX is in the hands of developers, and undergoing a large
university department wide beta test, and there is a lot of traffic
about it in c.s.a.*, already. By the time this proposal is enacted, the
A3000UX will be street hardware/software, if all goes well on both
sides. There are perhaps thousands of the machines in the field by now,
hundreds for sure, and the level of existing discussion already
justifies a subgroup, in any case.
Similarly, the MINIX port to the Amiga is released, and needs a home for
Amiga specific issues (such as getting an HD device driver written!)
The low traffic involved can coexist with the SYSV4 traffic for now.
This group should, as Bill Vermillion noted, get the Amiga specific Unix
or MINIX postings.
The generic Unix stuff should be discussed in comp.os.minix or else in
comp.unix.{admin,internals,programmer}.
3) The capture and care of moderators.
--------------------------------------
The moderators' job is to filter (pass on the suitability of) postings,
and to add appropriate Followup-To: target newsgroups to postings.
We have at least these volunteers:
zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle) Sacremento, California
HONP9@jetson.uh.edu (Jason L. Tibbits III) Houston, Texas
mwm#decwrl.dec.com (Mike Meyer) Palo Alto, California
They have sorted things out among themselves; Dan will do .announce,
Jason will do .reviews, and Mike will act as backup to both and as a
"moderator of last resort" when one of the other moderators and a
prospective poster can't agree on the suitability of a posting.
4) The concept of a monitor.
----------------------------
Lack of skill and bad posting habits are endemic on the net, and we may
be no more successful at improving things than anywhere else, but we
have a volunteer willing to try. Since c.s.a.introduction is the best
prospect for teaching correct habits early, we are going to install a
monitor, who will be in charge of writing posting guidelines,
admonishing the bad tempered, instructing the unskilled, maintaining the
periodic postings, and generally watching over the newsgroup. Ferry de
Jong (ferry@chorus.fr) has volunteered to take on the task. Wish him
luck and a calm temper.
5) Charters.
------------
Various volunteers are writing formal charters for the news groups, and
these will be posted in news.groups as PROPOSED CHARTER comp.sys.amiga.*,
as they are cleaned up and become available. More charter authors are
needed; don't ask, send it in if you feel like writing one; I'm real good
at cut and paste.
Now, what do I do with them when they're appoved?
6) Other comments.
------------------
COMP.SYS.AMIGA GOES BYE BYE
The goal is to turn comp.sys.amiga into a node rather than a group
"immediately".
OTHER AMIGA NEWSGROUPS
I have no plans to consider or touch comp.{sources,binaries}.amiga, or
alt.sources.amiga.
MOTHERHOOD
Ranting about the low utility to the net or the world of the contents of
some of the proposed subgroups in this partitioning is beside the point.
The traffic exists, it shows no sign of going away and every sign of
growing, it can no longer be supported in one newgroup, and the only
practical question remaining is how to best divide that existing traffic
to provide most benefit to the readership and lessened special c.s.a
maintenance headaches for site sysops.
KEYBOARD-CENTRISM
There have been many responses like "I am not having any trouble reading
c.s.a, therefore I'm going to vote NO on any change." Please lift up your
eyes; there is a world outside the terminal room window, and there are
people out there even as we speak drowning in the incredible traffic of
comp.sys.amiga. Not every site runs Cnews, not every site runs trn or
nn, many readers get c.s.a in email, many sites are small and and have
low news maintenance budgets and modest spool partitions, many readers
have real lives and other things to do with their news reading time
besides kill or bypass uninteresting articles. That you have no problem
is your good fortune, it is not an excuse to refuse to help your fellow
c.s.a subscriber who does have problems with the current volume.
RELAYS
The email relay for those not on the net is amiga-relay@udel.edu; it is
subscribed to via amiga-relay-request@udel.edu.
As best I can garner, subscribers may pick any of the existing c.s.a.*
groups to receive as mail, and get only what is posted in that group.
Replies, however, do not work as well; no matter the group of origin,
replies go back to comp.sys.amiga. This has partially subverted the
benefits of the existing splits, and needs repair. Unfortunately,
establishing a dialog (I have communication) with the operator of the
relay has so far been impossible. Help!
There was, I don't know if there still is, a posting relay service at
cs.berkeley.edu; I have had no luck contacting the operator of that
relay to give fair warning of this effort. Help!
The partition is going to have a drastic effect on relays of c.s.a, and
I need to make arrangements with the relay operators to get the needed
changes done, and to clean up some of the existing problems (like
dumping games postings back in c.s.a). I already have the udel.edu
operator's personal email address, but not his attention. Sigh.
NUMBER OF GROUPS
To the complaints that we can't pass a vote with a lot of groups: we not
only can (comp.unix, comp.sys.mac, and the IBM-PC groups just did so),
the group is causing such sysadmin and readership problems, we _must_
partition it severely. A cut in two or three pieces won't be nearly
enough, as the resulting groups would still be near the top of the
news.lists statistics.
HUMAN NATURE
To the complaints that the problems could all be solved with decent
posting habits, meaningful subject lines and modern newsreaders: 1) we
have to work with the group of subscribers we have, not the angels we
want; 2) people _don't_ use sensible subject lines, and you won't change
that behavior by wishful thinking, though it is still a good idea (see
below); 3) many, many readers have no choice in their newsreaders, being
in BITNET land or other barbarian districts [ ;-) ], and some have only
"Mail" as a choice of newsreader for c.s.a. For the general readership,
therefore, this opinion is simply false, not to mention self-centered
(see BOILERPLATE RANTING and KEYBOARD-CENTRISM, above).
AGGLOMERATIONS
Several people have suggested lumping things related (at least in their
minds) together to cut down the number of groups. The goal of the
partition is to create groups to exclude, not groups to include. The
more stuff that is lumped together in a single group, the greater the
chance you or the next person will have to read it all to get the small
part you want, the same problem c.s.a gives now. By dividing the same
set of postings into more, logical subgroups, you can choose to exclude
some of them more easily without missing what you want to read. There
are some compromises here. For the folks doing Mac emulations, plowing
through the Bridgeboard discussions is a nuisance, but to the greater
subnet that bought the Amiga to be an Amiga, avoiding all emulation
discussions is a Good Thing. Thus there is a c.s.a.emulations, but not a
c.s.a.emu_Mac, c.s.a.emu_IBM-PC, etc., the (fairly) happy medium.
On the other hand, just because there are two topics you personally
don't want to read doesn't make them good candidates for the same
subgroup; there are other people who will want to read exactly one of
them, and not plow through both in one subgroup. Thus dumping
c.s.a.emulations and c.s.a.advocacy (strange bedfellows indeed) together
is very unfair to the c.s.a.emulations subscribers, and besides it
annoys the pig.
SUBJECT LINES
Edwin Wiles made an excellent email suggestion with respect to the
c.s.a.applications group: since this group is going to mix a lot of
topics, posters should be especially diligent to put the name of the
application prominently (and probably first) in the subject line to
assist the folks using intelligent newsreaders to bypass/choose certain
topics. For example:
Subject: WORDPERFECT 5.0 -- How do I get my new Farsi font to work?
This is really a good comment for all the groups, but he made it
especially for this one. Checking the subject line last thing before
posting to be sure it is still appropriate to the contents of your
article is an important part of responsible posting.
Don't change the subject line arbitrarily; that makes it hard to follow
threads. But, don't leave it in an old thread when you've really chosen
a new topic, either.
CROSSPOSTING
Unnecessary crossposting when the groups are split will cause all grades
of grief to the primitive newsreader sites. Part of the goal of a
complex partition is to provide an explicit and appropriate place for
each posting. If you have something that you feel needs to be in several
groups, post it to c.s.a.misc instead. If you must crosspost, direct the
followups to c.s.a.misc. If that becomes the primary use of c.s.a.misc,
and we can keep crossposting down to 1% or less, this partition will be
a big win.
This in turn means that if you follow up a c.s.a.misc thread and only
talk about the part appropriate to _one_ of the subgroups, you should
change the newsgroups line to just that one group, and not continue in
c.s.a.misc. That will make the threads a little choppier, but you will
be reaching the audience focused on your intended topic better this way.
BOUNCED EMAIL
My apologies to several email correspondents from out in weird address
land; I've had lots of email bounce (email to waterloo.edu is breaking
at toronto.edu, for example, and I suddenly can't get email through
relay.cs.net, and lots of BITNET address are so bogus by the time they
get here and get turned around by Zorch, they break the NASA Ames mailer
going out, one of the most robust mailers worldwide, and ...), and I
don't have time right now for all the postmaster interactions it would
take to get things fixed, while also following the c.s.a partition
discussions and posting revisions and answering the flood of email on
the proposals and supervising moderation arrangements.
If you don't get an answer, it may _not_ be because Mom always liked me
best, it may be that an answer couldn't get through to you. I usually
try twice, then quit. Look for your unacknowledged ideas in the next
revision, before resending them to me.
VOTING
When (LATER!) it is time to vote, I'll put up a ballot to cut and paste
(or inclusive "R"eply, but check the address!) with yes/no votes on the
functionality of each proposed subgroup; net rules for Yes > (No + 100)
and Yes > (2 * No) will hold for these votes.
Where there is still significant disagreement about a name (not one
person posting often and loudly but lots of people posting on each
side), there will be a subordinate vote on the names proposed,
_plurality_ wins, Little Tin Dictator xanthian breaks ties and decides
which names deserve even to get a vote on them included in the first
place.
Even those voting against the functionality should still vote on a name
to get your choice noted in case the subgroup passes.
Although USENet rules require, and I will provide for and honor, a
separate vote for each group proposed, I strongly urge a straight yes or
no vote on the whole proposal, since some possible subsets of this
partitioning may well be worse than leaving things alone.
I'll be using an awk script to score the ballots, so the cut and paste
is mandatory to keep a format that awk can process. My sysop has
promised me a separate mailbox for ballots, too; posted ones or ones
mailed to my personal mailbox will be mutilated, trashed, spindled,
shredded, spat upon, and ignored.
We may forge the return address on the Call For Votes sent to the
news.announce.newusers moderator so that the reply address is the ballot
mailbox, or mail it from the the ballot mailbox, it depends on what
Scott (my sysop) works out.
YOUR COMMENTS
Open season for support, comments, and criticisms; I'll comment on
responding postings in news.groups as needed.
SCHEDULE
The third weekend after the one when Eliot Lear posts this to
news.announce,newgroups, if the discussion seems polarized enough for a
vote, I'll send him my call for votes. That about gives time for one
turn around to the extremes of the net at the 99% level; if you're out
there in the weeds, email a response quickly, a posted response will
probably miss the three week window.
There may well be edited versions of this document posted by me between
now and the vote,in response to comments, but they will go to
news.groups, not n.a.n or the Amiga groups. Look for the revision number
in the subject line to see if something new has been posted.
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REPLY TO
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Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>
--
The response key is pressed, an editor window opens, and here come the comments!rja7m@grace.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson) (11/05/90)
In article <1990Nov2.021300.27204@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, xanthian@zorch.sf-bay.org (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >Rename comp.sys.amiga to be comp.sys.amiga.misc >Rename comp.sys.amiga.tech to be comp.sys.amiga.programmer The above are both big wins and a good idea. Aside from the issues that Kent Paul Dolan cites, it also makes the Amiga namespace more consistent with the Mac, MSDOS, UNIX and OS/2 namespaces already existing and that helps new users find their way to the right newsgroup. >Create comp.sys.amiga.applications This should really be named comp.sys.amiga.apps in order to be consistent with the Mac, MSDOS, UNIX, and OS/2 news heirarchies. It clearly is a needed group. >Create comp.unix.amiga Not well named or with a good charter. Comp.os.minix isn't a high volume group and can handle the Amiga stuff there easily. If it should be split we should rename comp.os.minix to be comp.os.minix.misc and create comp.os.minix.amiga. Please note that Minix is not UNIX and vice versa. They don't share many folks interested in both. Similarly, comp.unix.amiga should be comp.unix.sysv.amiga in order to be consistent with the existing organisation of comp.unix.* The group will clearly be needed with the growing use of UNIX System V on the new Amiga. Otherwise the proposal sounds good and I wish Kent Paul Dolan well. As the person who organised and ranthe IBM-PC reorg vote last summer, I appreciate how difficult it can be to do what he is doing. Ran randall@Virginia.EDU