" Maynard) (08/03/89)
The postings in ba.news.groups and ca.news.groups about how some admins
want to nuke news.newusers.questions disgust me.
They complain about "trivial" questions, forgetting completely that
these questions are not trivial to the users who ask them, and that
they, too, had questions that would seem trivial now once upon a
time...kind of like a parent who forgets that they, too, were once 14
years old.
To top it all off, they don't even take their objection to the whole net
via news.groups (where I've redirected this discussion), but rather keep
it among themselves.
I have complained about newsgroups that have passed by overwhelming
margins before, but have not nuked them on my site. The basis for the
regular net is that siteadmins (who, admittedly, have the right to
control what goes on on their machine) honor the results of net votes on
the premise of fairness: they expect others who dislike votes they
support to propagate their favorite groups. The regular net has worked
pretty well on that basis.
I hope that these arrogant siteadmins (who must not care about new
users) reconsider their unilateral decision to nuke a legitimate group;
failing that, I hope that other California systems take up the slack in
propagation.
--
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
uucp: uunet!nuchat! (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity.
{attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +----------------------------------------
internet: jay@splut.conmicro.com | "He's T*d, Jim."-Richard "Bones" Sextonmef@dalek.silvlis.com (Mary Ellen Foley) (08/05/89)
The arguments against having news.newusers.questions seem to fall into three categories: 1) the questions are too simple to be of interest 2) the questions should be answered locally by sysadmin or documentation. 3) the answers are repetitive and often incorrect. As a relative novice, I appreciate this newsgroup. I'm not asking to be spoonfed, but until I read this newsgroup I didn't even know that you COULD buy printed documentation about the network news. It is a bit irritating that these people want to cut off this newsgroup because THEY don't find the subject matter interesting. I may not find the ham radio info exchange, or the discussions of gun ownership interesting, but that doesn't mean I think they should be stopped. I'm sure that people could find out about solar panels by buying documentation, but I don't suggest that we nuke sci.energy as extraneous information. I've learned things from reading this news.newusers.questions that I haven't read about elsewhere, and I hope it stays around. As I recall, news.announce.newusers says to send your questions to any guru, and my reaction was "so how do I know who they are?". As for repetitive/incorrect information, the same can be said of any other group (read rec.arts.tv.uk recently? You want to talk REPETITIVE.) and incorrect answers are correctly promptly by others who know. I am one of VERY few people at my site who reads and posts, our sysadmin is a consultant who logs in remotely an hour a day, and doesn't have time for lots of news questions. We also have a VP who doesn't like having news around (waste of time and disk space, says he) and so I don't want to make waves. If there are enough consenting adults who want to ask questions and answer questions, why is this any less useful than sci.lang.japan or rec.autos.sport or soc.religion.christian or talk.politics.soviet or ...? mef -- "You can't fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country." (who said this? Was is Will & Ariel Durant?) WARNING: Opinions in posting are smaller than they appear.