guest@geech.ai.mit.edu (Guest Account) (04/26/91)
In article <1991Apr26.033504.15992@ox.com> emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, moderator) writes:
Indeed there are any number of things that would be awful nice to have
but which would take a lot of work. *It's rapidly approaching the
stage where it's going to take a serious infusion of technology to
keep comp.archives running.* I really want to end up with something
much more generalizable, something that you could say to it "look for
all of the interesting articles about frame relay and whatever related
subjects on whatever lists, and just show me the interesting ones",
and it would find them for you; the newsreaders of the 1990's have
huge piles of news to weed through and only the puniest of newsgroups
to split them down with. Thus, I see no choice but to try and force
the issue and say "if the technology doesn't get better within a year,
I give up, I can't keep up with it all."
How about a different approach? Why not get people in the habit of
posting all articles about the availability of software to one group.
Say for instance a group named comp.sources.available. The posters
would have to follow your guidelines. You could then run some
software which automatically crossposts to the relevant newsgroups.
That way you don't have to search the entire news database and in
addition more people will be informed because of the wider
crossposting. The downside of this idea is that it would require a
possibly painful transition period in which people get used to
remembering to post to the group instead of following up the current
article directly.