scs@iti.org (Steve Simmons) (02/26/90)
As a news manager I feel kind of obligated to read news.groups and news.admin, but mercifully there is rarely something awful enough to make me enter the fray (aside from the occasional 'no' vote). Nonetheless I have opinions, and am going to toss them out. I've no hope that anything will actually get done, but would feel remiss if I didn't at least put up my marker. Problems (not a complete list :-( ): Too many people involved in the decision making processes, arguements over appropriateness of placement, lack of charter for individual distributions, conflicting/unclear distribution meanings. Proposal: Let's make the current canonical USENET groups separate distributions and abandon the current geographic ones. If people want to make geographic distributions that's fine, but keep them stated as geographic and under the appropriate header. For example, in Michigan we have a mi.sun newsgroup which works perfectly fine. When appropriate we cross-post to alt.sun, etc. Each of the distributions should make its own charter. Sci, rec, talk, comp, etc should make their own rules on appropriateness, starting new groups, renaming, and removing. This will end the distribution wars, and reduce the morass of people trying to make decisions. If 'news' wants to appoint a cabal while 'talk' goes with anarchy, that's fine. This is not a panacea. But it will simplify the decision making process, put control in a more appropriate place, and clean up some easily confused rules about distributions.