taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (02/08/87)
My friend Tim Pozar (moderator of mod.mag.fidonet) and I (moderator of mod.conferences and mod.comp-soc) were talking about the problems people having knowing what is going on in the various newsgroups that are a part of USENET. We're both members of 'the well' too, and on their system one of the nice features is that they have a conference that talks about what's going on in the other conferences. So, inevitably, we thought that this would be a good idea for USENET to have. Then we started kicking it around a bit and realized it would be a REALLY GOOD idea - sufficiently good that we decided to post this message to the net! In a nutshell, we're proposing the creation of a new newsgroup called something like "mod.newsgroup-overview" (or, if we can skip the 'mod' prefix, something like "news.groups-overview") which would be one of the 'automatically subscribed to' groups in the various news reading software. The group would contain postings like; ---------- Subject: mod.conferences This group is used for announcements of upcoming conferences, postings of Call For Papers, and so on. It is a moderated group and submissions should be sent to the following: conferences@hplabs.HP.COM or <backbone>!hplabs!conferences ---------- and for groups that have discussions that wander around from topic to topic, the posting could summarize what has been discussed in the previous 'n' weeks (more on that in a sec), so that people reading it could, in a few lines, decide if the actual topics of discussion are interesting or not. Since there are at last count 299 groups (outside of HP internal groups, Bay Area groups, California groups, Stanford groups and UCBerkeley groups that we receive on this machine) it is really incredibly difficult to figure out what is going on, and while the 'list of available newsgroups' is useful, for 99% of the people who join USENET they just don't have the patience to read the list. Also, discussions in groups change over time and this would give people a bit more freedom to unsubscribe from a group and then join again when the discussion moves to more interesting things. Another advantage is that there is quite a bit less volume of information - the way I figure it with ~300 groups we could have each group allowed to post a summary once every three months. This would result in approximately 3 articles a day. Now realistically, I'm sure that no more than 40% of the groups will have someone reporting in what is being discussed, so we're really talking approximately one message a day in the group. This is quite a manageable level, I think!! Furthermore, it needs to be moderated to enforce the one posting per three months plus it will ensure that people don't get into major flame wars about what is being discussed, whether it belongs in the group, and so on. *I* volunteer to moderate it. Yow. But I already have all the software in place and it's trivial to use, so it would merely mean that I get a wee bit more mail...nothing I'd notice, I'm sure!! The only problems I can envision with it are that for the unmoderated groups I might start getting summaries like "we've been discussing Kate Bush, and there sure seem to be a lot of jerks who think she's less than God Incarnate..." or "The latest topics include the idiocy of the people who designed Ada". If we can avoid the subjective value judgements we'd be really well off. (Perhaps someone is willing to write a script that summarizes the Subject: lines for a group for a period of time, removes all "Re:"s and noise words, then outputs the top 'n' topics for the previous amount of time...) Any comments? Suggestions? If we start this, I think we should break the three-month period into three-week sections and have each one assigned for a type of group (e.g. "mod.*" first, then "news.*", and so on). We can adjust the length of time of each section according to the number of groups in the section. More on that later, though. I think this could be an EXCELLENT way to improve USENET in a painless but very effective way. -- Dave Taylor
ghoti#@andrew.cmu.edu.UUCP (02/12/87)
[Kind-of-long.....Sorry] > taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) writes..... > .... > In a nutshell, we're proposing the creation of a new newsgroup called > something like "mod.newsgroup-overview" (or, if we can skip the > 'mod' prefix, something like "news.groups-overview") which would be > one of the 'automatically subscribed to' groups in the various news > reading software. > .... I am not a moderator, nor am I hoping to become one, but as a bboard system maintainer at a university (at which we receive over 400 bboards from the internet and usenet combined), I've noticed a feature on the internet which is not quite as well suported on the usenet bboards - the list-of-lists. It seems to me that if you take Dave Taylor's idea and modify it a bit you might be able to accomplish something even better than the originally planned idea (obviously, this is my opinion so far:-). SO: I propose the following as an adaptaion: [Initial set-up] The Moderator collects informational paragraphs from as many of the news-group maintainers as he can, and arranges them alphabetically in a file ---allow say about a month to compile the initial post. [First Post] This information which has been collected/organized is then posted at the begining of the next month (i.e. if it is ready by Feb 23, post it on March 1). [Upkeep] All news-group maintainers are invited to update their entry and/or submit their initial entry for this list at any time. The Moderator will take care of replacing out-dated information with new information, and can optionally post the updates seperately as they come in (Moderators choice at this point, I don't think it would be worth it, but I could be wrong). The Moderator should probably try to summarize the changes at the top of the file for example: CHANGES SINCE 2/1/87 POSTING: mod.squad --> New group news.room --> Deleted group net.foo --> Renamed --> comp.foo talk.alot --> New Description -------------------------- Individual Descriptions Follow ------------------------- At the begining of every month, the file is reposted - the summary at the top will allow you to quickly notice whether something has changed with respect to one of the groups you read or used to read, and will also inform you of new news-groups starting up that might interest you. There are still issues to be played with: Name of the news-group, Are intermediary updates sent out, or just monthly (maybe even bi-monthly if things seem to stay stable for lengths at a time) Format Terminology used in Summary Time required of Moderator to keep this reasonably upto-date (i.e. it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to insert or replace an entry) What opportunity is there for automation (and how much should be used) End of idea. I think it sounds reasonable, but i am not as involved with usenet operations as you are - what do you think? --fish (Adam Stoller <ghoti#@andrew.cmu.edu>)