lumsdon@dtoa1.dt.navy.mil (Esther Lumsdon) (02/26/90)
There's an existing newsgroup, comp.lang.idl, with extremely low traffic (2 articles in last 6 months). It was formed for discussion of "Interface Description Language". A bunch of users of another IDL ("Interactive Data Language") have discovered it, and each other, and want a newsgroup somewhere to discuss our IDL, and a nearly identical derivative of it called PV-WAVE. We've come up with several ideas: 1) A news guru said it's ok to join existing group, as long as subject lines for our articles are explicit about _which_ IDL the posting is about. He says this is better for the net than 2 very low-volume newsgroups would be. 2) Go through discussion and try to form our own newsgroup, knowing that we may not have enough votes to do it. Can we count the 15 users at 1 site as casting 15 separate votes? 3) Continue posting our stuff in the existing group comp.lang.idl, as there hadn't been a posting in it in the 5.5 months prior to one of us asking what this group is for. Sort of a polite takeover, with 1 poster politely defending the original charter of the newsgroup. What does netiquette or Emily Postnews say on this? We could _really_ use communicating with each other about IDL and PV-WAVE. Which is worse - 2 low-volume newsgroups or sharing a group that was created for quite another subject? Is there another course of action, one of which we're unaware? Oh, I looked at the comp.lang.functional discussion, and IDL/PV-WAVE don't fit that definition. They're procedural vendor-supplied languages with variables. IDL and PV-WAVE are "interactive, programmable image calculator and display systems used in analysis of scientific data", with sorta-signal-processing and nice data-reading and nice image-processing capabilities. Thanks for any guidance! --------------- My thoughts are my own, not the Navy's ------------------ Esther Lumsdon lumsdon@dtoa1.dt.navy.mil lumsdon%dtrc.arpa David Taylor Research Center, a Navy lab Annapolis Lab cm 301-267-3816 av 281-3816