lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) (04/10/89)
I've been pretty quiet on this subject up till now, but I think I want to chime in my $.02. It seems to be consensus that we need to keep tight control over the namespace. So we have had a rough set of guidelines to which most everyone has voluntarily agreed. It's worked fairly well up to this point, and to some extent I question whether we should bother changing what we've got. If we must fiddle with the current setup, let us at least consider who should make decisions, and how those decisions should be made. $BEGIN METADISCUSSION The WHO is the easy part. Me. I want to make the decisions for my system. You might want to make the decisions for your system. What does it mean for a newsgroup to be created? Simply that someone issues a control message requesting that group's creation. Whether or not *I* carry it is still my choice. It so happens that I tend to pass those groups Gene Spafford sees as ``legitimate''. HOW is a little harder. The fact is that netnews is a keyword based system in disguise. If there are too many keywords, they become useless, and the user will have a hard time picking which groups messages belong, both when he posts, and when he looks for information. [NB: One could argue that newsgroups are not a good thing. Let's not.] It's important to pick a small set of informative keywords. Too few, and you'll have too many uninteresting messages to wade through; too many, and you have a dictionary ;-) So anyway, it's more the WHO that we seem to be arguing about, these days. I'd like to make the suggestion that those who want to carry a newsgroup do so, and those that don't don't. If people are interested in what the rest of the USENET is doing, they can base their decision on whether to carry a group or not on a ``vote''. That way, you decide whether a group should exist or not. At first glance, one might believe this to be the advancement of anarchy, but in general, I will still follow spaf's or maybe some other trusted individual's lead. Also, if I see lots of messages for a particular newsgroup piling up in junk, I would be tempted to create such a group. Finally, I think we should vote on my suggestions and if they pass, they should become official. Send your votes to nobody@net.bio.net and I'll summarize ;-) Lastly, those of you who actually read into what I've written have noticed that I am neither supporting nor condemning any other management proposal. I'll just follow the one I like. In conclusion, you all owe me $.02.