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