bryce@eris.berkeley.edu (Bryce Nesbitt) (02/21/88)
The 30 days for the vote on adding a ".tech" group to comp.sys.amiga has
expired. The final results are as follows:
The filesystem on which votes were stored was destroyed. There are no
known backups.
I'm not happy about this, but there is no way to recover the information.
An accurate tally can not be produced. There is no way to verify the
votes. Informal results are estimated as follows:
YES ~200
(~25 would prefer the name ".programmer". This leaves the
placement of hardware articles up in the air) (Many indicated
they would still read both. Others indicated that they will
read both, but concentrate more "quality" reading time on one
or the other.)
NO ~35
(Many no votes came from BITNETers that feared loosing access
to the new group. Most of the rest of the NOs were from people
who felt the split would not work.)
YES ON MULTI-WAY KEYWORD SPLIT ~40
(The multi-way split was never formally announced, but was
voted on be some people anyway)
Actual formalized use of the "Keywords:" line has been discussed, but no
vote has been taken.
Sigh. It is still difficult to extract useful information from
comp.sys.amiga.
-Bryce Nesbitt
|\_/| . ACK!, NAK!, EOT!, SOH!
{o o} . Bryce Nesbitt
(") BIX: mleeds (temporarily)
U USENET: bryce@eris.berkeley.EDU -or- ucbvax!eris!brycehaitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) (02/22/88)
bryce@eris.berkeley.edu (Bryce Nesbitt) writes: > >The 30 days for the vote on adding a ".tech" group to comp.sys.amiga has >expired. The final results are as follows: > > The filesystem on which votes were stored was destroyed. There are no > known backups. > >I'm not happy about this, but there is no way to recover the information. >An accurate tally can not be produced. There is no way to verify the >votes. Informal results are estimated as follows: > > YES ~200 > (~25 would prefer the name ".programmer". This leaves the > > NO ~35 > (Many no votes came from BITNETers that feared loosing access > to the new group. Most of the rest of the NOs were from people > who felt the split would not work.) > > YES ON MULTI-WAY KEYWORD SPLIT ~40 > (The multi-way split was never formally announced, but was > voted on be some people anyway) > >Actual formalized use of the "Keywords:" line has been discussed, but no >vote has been taken. > >Sigh. It is still difficult to extract useful information from >comp.sys.amiga. I would like to put my early suggestion for foramalized keywords to a vote, but am not exactly sure how to do this. Also I have limited access to "news.groups" which is where I understand discussion of a proposal is supposed to take place. Could someone send me email explaining what to do? I don't want to screw this up by not following proper procedures (h*ll, I didn't even know news.groups or comp.sys.graphics existed until just a few weeks ago). As a trial of the formalized keywords I suggest we specify ".tech" as the only formal keyword. Lets see how it works from there? For those who missed it, here is a copy of the keyword proposal: Any suggestions for improvement would also be appreciated. ----------------------------------------- NEW SUGGESTION FOR SPLITTING UP amiga/comp-amiga. --------------------------- I finally am able to read news.groups. I was expecting a raging debate as to how to or whether to split up this group. Instead I found a news group with hundreds of messages, of which only a handfull were about splitting comp.sys.amiga. I assume others have the same difficulty getting to news.groups that I've run into? (I still have not figured out how to post to it!) Well, I've put some thought into this, and this article will contain my suggestion for how to split up comp.sys.amiga. First, however, I would like to discuss what I feel to be the relevant considerations. I'll try to keep this breif. After looking at the previous suggestion to split comp.sys.amiga into two or more groups and the few responses that were posted, it seemed to me these are the issues we must consider: 1) Conservation of reading time. If comp.sys.amiga grows in proportions to the growth of the Amiga market, it is likely that there will soon be too many postings for many individuals to follow. As key people find keeping up with the net too time consuming they will, of necessity, have to stop following it. RECENTLY IT SEEMS TO ME A NUMBER OF C= PEOPLE HAVE STOP- PED REGULARLY FOLLOWING COMP.SYS.AMIGA! From the nature of the response patterns of C= messages I also think quite a few who used to read the board now respond mostly to postings referenced by someone else or which were also sent direct via mail. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE I WANT TO EN- COURAGE TO FOLLOW THE DISCUSSIONS, ESPECIALLY THE TECHNICAL POSTINGS! 2) A simple two-way split (ie: add group comp.sys.amiga.tech) would probably result in comp.sys.amiga degenerating into chatter. What reduces this now is the Flaming over non-technical threads that last too long. 3) A multi-way split is too complicated, for us and the Net GODS. Now for my solution (previously sent in a less thought out version to Bryce Nesbit {does my mail get to him??}). What I suggest is that we use the keyword field in the following manner. Reserve the keyword ".tech" for designating a technical posting. Furthermore, for future expansion, reserve the use of "." as the first character of a keyword for "sanctioned" keywords only (in the begining only ".tech"). Thus any keyword could be placed in the keywords feild that does not begin with ".". The immeadiate effect of this will be that those who must filter their reading will be able to do so. In the future however, more sanctioned keywords could be added. The keywords might be ".tech", ".intuition", ".hardware", ".graphics", ".printers", ".product_comments", etc. These would be used to create a filter to sift the postings. Ideally I might have a readnews filter defined as something like this: filter := {(!.printers) & (.graphics | .intuition)} and I would recieve only those postings which had to do with intuition or graphics but not printers. Combine with non-santioned keywords, specific articles could be filtered, as in filter := {product_comments & ASDG} would return postings about ASDG products. Finally, I would like one added feature. Filter by author sould also be available. ie: Some people's postings I always want to read, and there are a few who I never want to read. These should also be possible fields. How would you use this? Well, I figure the user creates a prioritised filter specification and also indicates the number of messages he/she wishes to read. The system would then return that number of postings, according to the filter. BEST OF ALL, THIS SYSTEM WOULD BE ALMOST TOTALLY TRANSPARENT TO THE CURRENT STRUCTURE OF COMP.SYS.AMIGA AND WOULD REQUIRE (ALMOST?) NO SUPERVISION BY THE NET GODS. Please send me E-Mail with your comments, as this is not yet an official proposal. I'm not quite sure what one does to make an official proposal. Thanks, Wade. UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!haitex ARPA: crash!pnet01!haitex@nosc.mil INET: haitex@pnet01.CTS.COM
jesup@pawl21.pawl.rpi.edu (Randell E. Jesup) (02/25/88)
Concerning splitting comp.sys.amiga using keywords:
No way will it work, sorry. Many, many people who read news
(quite possibly the majority) can't use keywords at all, let alone construct
filters using them. If it is ignored to any great extent (which it would
be) it becomes useless, or almost so.
We're splitting comp.sys.amiga into 2 groups now. If volume in the
future requires it, we'll split it into more as required, when the need is
shown. Note that one of the reasons for this 'keyword split' may well be
that the person who suggested it doesn't use rn, and thus has no 'k' key
or kill files (if I remember readnews correctly, which he mentioned).
I have removed comp.misc from the distribution line of this article.
// Randell Jesup Lunge Software Development
// Dedicated Amiga Programmer 13 Frear Ave, Troy, NY 12180
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