robin@bnrmtv.UUCP (Robin Coutellier) (07/07/89)
My company (about 400+ employees) is in the process of playing musical
operating systems, and our UUCP/USENET connection will be moved to our
in-house SUN network in the near future. One of the issues yet to be
resolved is which newsgroups to subscribe to after the move.
Currently we receive a wide variety of both business (comp, gnu, etc.)
newsgroups and non-business (rec, soc, misc, talk, etc.) newsgroups,
with a sprinkling of 3 or 4 alt groups. The spool area generally contains
about 20K 4K blocks of articles.
There is a minor concern about space on the SUN network which can
easily be resolved by jettisoning the talk and alt groups, and
possibly some of the more verbose soc subgroups and/or obscure comp
subgroups.
The real issue now is censorship. Our IS management wants only
business-related newsgroups (I am the USENET administrator within the
IS dept). Most of the USENET readers here (myself included), would
like to continue to get what might be considered "frivilous"
newsgroups, such as rec and soc. My manager disagrees (he does not
read USENET), and says he will give this to the company directors for
a decision (none of them have access to USENET -- they are VM guys,
and I doubt that they even know what USENET is, let alone read it).
My manager and I are going around and around on this. Before this
gets escalated to upper management, I would like to know (and so would
my manager) how is/was this situation handled at other sites? What
were the justifications for subscribing to any non-business related
newsgroups at your site? Are these newsgroups restricted during
prime-time hours? Do you have many employees with flexible hours or
who put in about 10+ hours per day? Please email your responses to
me.
aTdHvAaNnKcSe.
Robin Coutellier
Northern Telecom (formerly Bell-Northern Research)
(415) 940-2333 (Mountain View, CA)
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