page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (12/20/88)
Don Speck:
>The comp groups have a larger average article size than the others.
Your stats are interesting, but you're comparing grapefruits and
oranges. Take out comp.sources, comp.binaries and comp.mail.maps and
I bet your average article size for comp.* (the discussion groups)
will decrease.
..Bob
--
Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page
Have five nice days.justin@inmet (12/23/88)
/* Written 9:44 pm Dec 20, 1988 by berleant@cs.utexas.edu.UUCP in inmet:news.admin */ [...] Is there any chance of dynamic creation (and deletion) of newsgroups? I have in mind that anyone can create a newsgroup for the purpose of carrying on a discussion of a certain topic. Then, newsgroups that do not have any postings for some length of time will be automatically deleted by net wide rmgroup commands (or whatever). [...] Dan berleant@cs.utexas.edu /* End of text from inmet:news.admin */ Hear, hear! I've been working on a pile of suggestions following this line for quite some time, and haven't had the time to work it into a reasonable format. In *very* brief, how about: -- Dynamically created and deleted newsgroups, which can be created by any sysadmin (on the theory that sysadmins at least slightly understand what they're doing), with software written to automatically delete a group after it has been dormant for some length of time. -- The concept of Topics within newsgroups. *Anyone* can create a topic, to provide a home for whatever subject they want to discuss. Again, these would be automatically deleted when they went dormant. Also, one could simply kill a topic, instead of having to go to elaborate lengths to make sure that all relevant threads are killed. -- Eliminate crossposting *as it now exists*. Instead, enable users to subscribe only to a particular topic within a newsgroup, instead of the whole group. When something that would today be crossposted comes up, one would pick the best home, create a topic for it, post a tickler on the other relevant groups giving the topic and newsgroup, and just work within the topic. The software would have to have the ability to, at user request, automatically subscibe to the topic that the tickler points out. There are a number of other points I've been thinking about, but these are the ones that could probably achieve the greatest good. I'm not sure that there is any way to do this without a trauma on the order of that of The Great Renaming, but the structural problems of the Net are real, and aren't going away... -- Justin du Coeur
ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Brad Allen) (01/05/89)
In article <128400002@inmet> justin@inmet writes: >-- Eliminate crossposting *as it now exists*. Instead, enable users to > subscribe only to a particular topic within a newsgroup, instead of > the whole group. You imply that you'd rather have messages categorized very specifically. Fine. What is totally wrong with your idea though is that you're forgetting that the more specific something gets, the more areas it fits into. You have to allow for crossposting, links to more than one topic, etc. if you want a good reading system; otherwise, you'll have to scan just about every topic you can dream up, seeing whether anyone posted something you wanted to know about in what they thought was that area. Also -- rn eliminates redisplayal of crossposted material anyway; is this a problem with other readers? That should be fixed, for just this reason ... if so, should I ask someone to let me help make sure this gets done? another semantic mumbling from brad allen <ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu>