randall@uvaarpa.virginia.edu (Randall Atkinson) (02/05/90)
This is a formal request for immediate disconnection of the FidoNET gateway to the USENET group comp.os.os2. Said gateway was created without discussion or vote on USENET and has caused the signal to noise ratio of comp.os.os2 to dramatically decrease. In particular about 1/3 of the messages to that group in the past few days have been of the content "Hi Joe nice to see you here" or "Mike, I sent you the file foobar". The gateway maintainer and I have discussed this and he informs me that he cannot set messages originating in FidoNET to have an appropriate value in the Distribution: field and is not in a position to filter the messages originating on FidoNET. Moreover, the charter of the FidoNET group is much broader than the voted-on charter for the USENET group comp.os.os2 and the FidoNET group specifically includes postings of the sort that belong in comp.sources.wanted and comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d and such on USENET. Finally, many of the FidoNET postings appear as a single long line of text which is unreadable by most USENET people. These differences in charter and problems creating a suitably configured gateway cause the situation to be unresolvable at present. I have encouraged the FidoNET gateway maintainer to create an OS/2 newsgroup under a fidonet.* or fido.* top-level heirarchy. (I first heard of the concept from Tom Neff and it makes a lot of sense). The creation of fidonet.os2 would permit USENET folks to selectively carry the FidoNET articles via existing mechanisms and not have the USENET group be flooded with messages that are not appropriate for comp.os.os2 but which apparently are appropriate for a FidoNET group. Followup postings are directed to news.admin since this posting primarily relates to USENET News Administration.