[net.general] Spring Cleaning of Newsgroups

sjb (11/14/82)

It may be November, but I think it's high time for a spring
cleaning around the net.  I am referring specifically to all
of the dead and unused newsgroups lying around.  Every few
months, someone brings up the concept of newsgroup expiration,
but no one has yet to clean up the old newsgroups, and old
newsgroups don't fade away; they hang around forever and ever.
They way I see it, there are two basic reasons for the presence
of dead newsgroups:

1) When people submit proposals for new groups, they often say later
   that they received ''overwhelming support'' for the group's creation.
   The problem is that we have never defined what ''overwhelming support''
   means.  Many people consider 10 yes votes overwhelming support.  This
   is just not enough.  In a network of countless thousands of people,
   ''overwhelming support'' should be in the hundreds, not tens.

2) The main reason for all these dead groups is not that a lot of
   people use old software which allows anyone and everyone to create
   a group, but rather because a lot of them were created a while ago
   when a lot of people did in fact run the old software, and no one
   has cleaned them up.  We can no longer go by the old premise of
   ''Well, this group exists on our site, so it must be OK to post
   to it.''  Witness things like net.joke, net.periph, and the now
   famous net.uniz-wizards and net.unix-wzards.  The reasons these
   exist on a lot of sites is that no one has bothered to get rid of
   them.  Here on alice and wherever else I take care of news, I
   take great pains to keep things clean and keep these ''illegitimate''
   groups off the systems so people can't post to them.  But not
   everyone does this, and many people freely post to them because
   of it.

So it's now time to open our eyes to this problem and do something about
it.  Further discussion on this should probably take place in net.news.group
or net.news.  If people are willing, I will go through the list of groups
around here and post a summary or the ones I think should be creamed.
They will include dead, unused groups and illegitimate groups.

How about it, people?
Adam