msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) (02/19/90)
> > several folks have noted that the process takes too long > > as things stand. > I don't buy this. The creation takes 14+21+5 = 40 days if done > according to official rules. I don't see that the need for any new group > is so critical that 40 days is anything to get riled up over. I think this is true *almost* all the time -- specifically, it's true when the group is being created for the usual reason of partitioning a longstanding stream of existing articles. However, it seems to happen about once every 2 years that there is a need for an "emergency newsgroup". Some event in the outside world causes so many articles to be posted that waiting 14 days, let alone 40, for them to have their own newsgroup is a major inconvenience to everyone who reads the groups where they turn up. Specifically, this has happened 3 times in the years I've been on the net. The interesting thing is that although the situations have been parallel, the response in newsgroup terms has been different each time. In 1985 the event was the Great Coca-Cola Flavor Change Crisis. In those days, there was a backbone with backbone, and Mark Horton reacted swiftly to the crisis by creating a newsgroup for it -- I believe it was called net.misc.coke -- while simultaneously announcing that this was temporary and the group would be removed in a few months when things settled down. In 1986 the event was the Challenger disaster. The two existing space-related newsgroups, then called net.space and net.columbia, were overwhelmed with postings of personal grief and postings relaying news that we'd all already seen in yesterday's paper... to the point where the few articles with worthwhile *information* in them were hard to find. On this occasion nothing was done, or even proposed, in terms of creating new newgroups. Any new group would probably have had to be moderated to improve things in this situation, and I don't even remember if moderated groups existed then; anyway, nobody was volunteering. In 1989 the event was the announcement of cold fusion. For a while things were looking like 1986, except that this time articles were posted to about 5 different newsgroups instead of just two. Pretty soon a new newsgroup was proposed. A week or two was lost in wrangling over whether it should be sci.physics.fusion, sci.fusion, or something else -- if we'd had sci.energy then, sci.energy.fusion would have been proposed too, no doubt! Meanwhile others, disgusted with the lack of progress, proposed alt.fusion, and this was created. The result was that some people, considering that "you never know how far a posting to alt.* is going to be distributed", posted to all the newsgroups they'd *been* posting too, and since alt.* isn't part of Usenet, nobody could legitimately ask them to stop doing that; and other people posted only to alt.fusion. Thus, people whose sites didn't get alt.* missed some articles; those whose sites did, simply had to read one MORE newsgroup if they wanted to read about cold fusion, and still had to skip cold fusion articles in all the groups they'd been skipping them in. And then eventually we did get sci.physics.fusion, which more or less stopped the flow in sci.physics, sci.research, etc., as intended; but alt.fusion did not wither away, and still exists, perpetuating the distribution problem in theory (though I suspect that in practice more sites are getting it than would have gotten alt.* at the time). Of the three net crises, 1985 was by far the easiest one to live through. It was over in a matter of days. What I'm saying is that while 40 days to create is fine for a normal group, emergency groups have been shown to be a recurring need, and we need a procedure that can be activated when that need occurs. My best thought on the matter is for the net to vote now on whether to grant Emergency Newsgroup Creation Powers to a particular person or set of people. Any of them would then be empowered to create a group when warranted by a heavy flow of articles related to some news event; such a group would have a limited lifetime (say 2-3 months) *unless* it passed an existence vote in the meantime in the normal fashion. Of course, if we had Trial-Basis Newsgroups, we might not need this. My feeling is that we probably would need it anyway. And we don't *have* Trial-Basis Newsgroups, anyway. (It would also be nice to have *subgroups* created in a temporary fashion, for when a *single* group is flooded temporarily by one topic, the way rec.arts.movies was with Batman and with both Back to the Future movies, among others. But I can't see any reasonable way to do this, given that people on the net are often not reasonable.) -- Mark Brader, Toronto "Common sense isn't any more common on Usenet utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com than it is anywhere else." -- Henry Spencer This article is in the public domain.
tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/19/90)
> However, it seems to happen about once every 2 years that there is a > need for an "emergency newsgroup". Like comp.periphs.scsi? Yeah, I can see the big rush for this ... > but alt.fusion did not wither away, and still exists, perpetuating the > distribution problem in theory We are very well connected in the altnet and have not received any articles for that group, which I removed here within a month of the creation of sci.physics.fusion. Dave
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (02/19/90)
Other "emergency" situations have existed, and sometimes the groups were created for them. In the early days, of course, groups were created left and right on a whim. Some of today's groups are the result of that. Another example was comp.sys.next. When the NeXT was launched, this group was created right away without a vote. And it continues to be an active and viable top-100 group to this day. I think it would be nice if temporary subgroups of "news.groups" could be created and removed freely by a responsible individual. Many debates could have been put in such groups to everybody's benefit. Indeed, news.groups seems to see higher volume traffic (for a short time) about certain subjects (like fish) than the groups on those subjects ever see. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
unccab@calico.med.unc.edu (Charles Balan) (02/20/90)
In article <98509@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > >I think it would be nice if temporary subgroups of "news.groups" could >be created and removed freely by a responsible individual. Many >debates could have been put in such groups to everybody's benefit. > Actually, I think that this is quite a good idea. I can envision needs for it. The problem would be to find the "responsible individual." I think that a co-moderation of 2 or 3 "responsible persons" would be the best bet, although that sounds overly-bureaucratic even to me. What about this: 1 responsible person empowered to create the emergency news.groups.*, but there must be a minimum number of postings to that group per /day/week/month (depending on the nature of the beast) to the effect that, once the "emergency group" has dwindled to less than the prescribed number of postings, it should then be removed or voted on to be replaced by a proper domain.group. Also, if it is felt that the group may be properly categorized anyway (as in sci.physics.fusion or whatever) it would be easier to create a logical group while this *emergency* group was already functioning (similar to alt.*, eh?) but there would be no need to alt.* the group in order to get it running right away. In any case, the minimum number of postings would help ensure that the "responsible person" would abide by existing rules and also not get flamed for removing or creating emergency groups. S/He would just be an expediter. Comments? Questions? No flames to my personage please, but feel free to disagree. Thank you. Charles Balan UNCCAB@med.unc.edu , UNCCAB@uncmed.uucp , UNCCAB@unc.bitnet %%%%%%%%%%%%% A Witty Saying Proves Nothing - Voltaire %%%%%%%%%%%%
emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (02/20/90)
In article <98509@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
Another example was comp.sys.next. When the NeXT was launched, this group
was created right away without a vote. And it continues to be an active
and viable top-100 group to this day.
Not quite, Brad -- I did start taking votes for this one, but when
there got to be over 200 of them and NeXT discussion showing up
everywhere on the net I got tired of counting and just created it. A
couple of hate-mail messages ensued but they quickly died away. (So
did my interest in the NeXT, but that's another story). The name
was right, the time was right, the interest was obvious -- no
reason not to go ahead.
The current newgroup procedure discriminates against the timely
creation of obvious and sensible new groups at the expense of
providing a means of reconciling bitter and irreconcilable political
differences. The whole voting process is a needless waste of time.
Much better results could be achieved (at least among some group
hierarchies) by planning ahead for an orderly newsgroup growth
process. There's got to be a better way than the current procedure,
which can result in long delays and needless battling over what are
really relatively simple questions (is there interest? is there
information? is there a good name?).
--Ed