max@eros.uucp (Max Hauser) (07/30/88)
May I humbly suggest the following renamings, now that "the great
renaming" has had a couple of years to sink in; they would greater
reflect actual content, and therefore better serve new readers to go
directly to the topics of their interest and not risk the faux-pas
of posting to the wrong group because of its name:
rec.birds -> rec.birdWATCHING (uppers and lowers, as shown)
rec.pets -> rec.cats (though lately it has begun to broaden)
rec.audio -> rec.misinf (abbreviated as shown; leave open interpretation)
rec.food.cooking -> rec.helpless.bachelors OR rec.bisquick (snappier)
rec.travel -> rec.tourism
misc.consumers -> sci.yuppie (as a data corpus for social scientists)
-- or alternatively, misc.experts (as a welcome-to-usenet)
Also, if the rn software is going to discern and reject articles
containing a certain fraction of lines with the quote-inclusion
character (thus forcing people who quote deliberately and
purposefully to circumvent the software by choosing other than the
default quote character, for example), perhaps it could also
discern and reject awfully clever allusions to Douglas Adams and
Thomas Pynchon (which run in the ratio approximately 5:1, depending
apparently on whether the poster is a computer hacker or not),
since they grow rather tedious after the 1000th or so; if any people
indeed allude deliberately and purposefully, they would, by analogy
with the quote-character situation, circumvent the software by
choosing a new author, if that is possible.
Respectfully submitted -- M. Hauser