mangoe@mimsy.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (03/29/89)
I remain unconvinced that we have any need for these rules, because I don't see any real reason for these knds of votes in the first place. There are basically two kinds of deletions: those of active groups, and those of dead groups. As far as active groups are concerned, there is clearly every reason in the world to forbid these kinds of votes; as the current heat shows, they largely serve as rhetorical tools in content or personality fights. Deletions of active groups are purely the prerogative of sytem adminstrators who do not wish to carry the group, and more generally, the backbone. I also think that deletions of dead groups are properly an administrative function. The sound reasons for deleting them-- space and overhead-- are the system admin's purvue, not the readership's. The bad reason, namespace size, is in my view not a real problem. To delete ten or even thirty groups is not going to make a meaningful dent in the size of the namespace, and people are still going to be lazy and not bother to try and find out what groups are appropriate to their posting. If we need a deletion rule, it should be something like this: when the propagation of a group, as measured in the arbitron system, gets sufficiently low for some set number of measurements, it should be dropped by the backbone. C. Wingate
msb@sq.com (Mark Brader) (04/03/89)
> There are basically two kinds of deletions: those of active groups, and > those of dead groups. ... I also think that deletions of dead groups > are properly an administrative function. ... Good point! I still think it is reasonable to pass all deletion proposals by the net, but if the group is truly dead there shouldn't be any need for 100 deletion votes, or the like. > As far as active groups are concerned, there is > clearly every reason in the world to forbid these kinds of votes; as the > current heat shows, they largely serve as rhetorical tools in content or > personality fights. ... However, this is not so clear-cut. There have been a number of cases of the form of the following fictitious example: " I have monitored the last month's traffic in sci.beans. I find that there " were 256 articles. However, 153 of these were cross-posted to sci.legumes, " 42 to sci.vegetables, 39 others to both sci.legumes and sci.vegetables, and " 66 of the rest to sci.physics.gases. Since this group attracts so little " traffic that is not also posted elsewhere, I propose that it be deleted. This is a legitimate topic for voting on; the question is how many of the group's readers also read enough of the other groups to see the articles of interest to them. For such cases, I think the usual rules should apply. This type of deletion tends to affect subgroups: I think that there was at least an element of this sort of situation when the groups net.women.only and net.astro.expert were deleted, for instance. It would also be the sort of reason that might be used if the soc.* groups were to be rearranged. As for personality wars, I think the "2/3 majority to delete" proposed rule is perfectly reasonable there in any case. -- Mark Brader "You can do this in a number of ways. SoftQuad Inc., Toronto IBM chose to do all of them... utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com why do you find that funny?" -- D. Taylor This article is in the public domain.