gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/15/86)
I hereby propose that net.general be deleted. Before you leap to
your soapbox, hear me out. Then, MAIL your vote to gen-vote@phri. Since I
anticipate a *lot* of mail on this one, please include either the string
"delete net.general" or "keep net.general" in the subject; the count will
be done by a shell script. If you have something you actually want me to
read, also include the string "discussion".
According to the "Rules for posting to net.general" which Gene
Spafford (gatech!spaf) posts every month, net.general is only for items
that *everybody* on the net should read. I submit that there really aren't
any articles that meet that criterion; for the few that do, net.news.adm or
net.announce is probably more appropriate. I've put this on net.general
only because if I don't, people will complain, "How come you didn't ask us,
the readers of net.general, what *we* thought?"
Personally, I don't get too worked up over the errant postings on
net.general. What bothers me more is the massive traffic on net.followup
that gets generated after every one. We all know about the dinette set,
and the earring, and the speaker system. We don't need 25 flames about
each one. The resources wasted shipping those flames around far exceed
what it cost to send the original article. The particular article that
prompted me to post this proposal was about 50 lines long. The original
was about 5; right there we're 10:1 in flames.
So, send me your vote. Please, do *not* post your vote to the
entire network. If you have something to add to the discussion, mail it to
gen-vote@phri and I will post periodic summaries (on net.news.group). If
you have something to add that absolutely, positively must be posted, at
least post it to net.news.group where it belongs.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/17/86)
In article <2212@phri.UUCP> I wrote: > I hereby propose that net.general be deleted. and went on to describe how you should cast your vote. Aparantly most of you didn't pay attention and are going to have your votes counted not the way you intended. Please keep in mind that the votes are going to be counted by a shell script and nobody is actually going to look at most of the responses. The question is "should we delete net.general?" To vote "yes", send mail to gen-vote@phri.UUCP with a Subject line that includes the string "delete net.general". It is sufficient to simply reply to this article and leave the generated "Subject: Re:" line alone if you want to vote "yes". If you want to vote "no", make sure the Subject line has the string "keep net.general" in it. If you reply to this article and don't alter the subject, the Subject line will, by default, say "Re: Let's delete net.general" -- this will be counted as a "yes" vote by my shell script regardless of what you say in the body of the letter. In either case, if you include the string "discussion" somewhere in the Subject line, your letter will (in addition to being counted as a vote one way or the other), be picked out for reading by me. Do this if you want to include some text that you want me to read. If all you want to do is register your vote, you need not use this "feature". It is *not* necessary for you to say "Yes, delete it" or "No, keep it" in the body of your letter -- the Subject line says it all. If you want to add discussion without casting a vote, make the Subject read simply "discussion". -- Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/17/86)
[Note: the following messages have been edited and reformatted for brevity.
Elipsis in brackets indicate passages deleted by me. My comments are also
enclosed in brackets and maked with my initials like this -- RHS]
----------------
From: cmcl2!seismo!munnari!mulga.oz!kerry (Kerry Raymond)
Subject: keep net.general discussion
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne
Even if nothing appropriate is sent to net.general for months, I think it
should be retained. After all it is the ONE newsgroup that everyone
should be subscribed to (be nice if all the news programs enforced this).
If the volume is low, it won't bother anyone.
If the matter is important enough, everyone should read it.
Asking "what is important enough" is a good question. A paranoid example
might be some legislative change which threatens the very existence of
Usenet, or some insanity like having to send in paperwork for every
item posted, or new user added.
The problem seems to lie in net.followup, perhaps it needs to be moderated.
(Perhaps net.general needs to be moderated).
I am not convinced that net.announce and net.news.adm are that well read
in genuine user-community systems (i.e. no resident gurus).
----------------
From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Subject: Re: Let's delete net.general
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
[This is a perfect example of a vote which clearly was intended as a "no"
but will get counted as a "yes" because the author didn't follow the
directions on how to format his message. Sorry Mark, but you should know
better. I do *not* want mistakes like this to affect the vote; please read
my previous two articles to make sure you are voting properly -- RHS]
keep net.general
The last time this came up, it was almost decided to delete it. But the
kicker is this. There is a certain type of message that isn't important
enough for net.annouce (in the opinion of the poster) that is still
appropriate to net.general. (I recently went through 25 messages in
net.general about about 25% of them fit into this category, in my opinion.)
If we get rid of net.general, where does this traffic go?
Perhaps the monthly policy posting should be softened a bit to indicate
that net.general is for things of worldwide significance (as opposed to
local things like the earring) that aren't important enough for net.announce.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (02/17/86)
In article <2212@phri.UUCP> gen-vote@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > ... What bothers me more is the massive traffic on net.followup > that gets generated after every one. We all know about the dinette set, > and the earring, and the speaker system. We don't need 25 flames about > each one. The resources wasted shipping those flames around far exceed > what it cost to send the original article. The particular article that > prompted me to post this proposal was about 50 lines long. The original > was about 5; right there we're 10:1 in flames. Now this is really funny! We are considering deleting net.general not because of *its* volume, but the volume of net.followup later, provide by the tireless actions of those attempting to correct the mispostings by supplying many more followups to the misposting to let you know how wasteful of network resources it is to .... Oh, never mind. Yes, there is a valuable lesson here, but I am not optomistic that it will be widely recognized or accepted. -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam ~ Ah don't need no diamond ring ~ ~ Ah don't need no Cadillac car! ~ ~ Ah just wanna drink my Lone Star beer ~ ~ Down in the Lightnin' bar! ~
gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/18/86)
[Reminder: votes on this issue should be sent to gen-vote@phri and
should strictly follow the format laid out in <2216@phri.UUCP>. Do
*not* send your vote directly to me. -- RHS]
From: John P. Nelson <cmcl2!harvard!panda!teddy!jpn>
Subject: keep net.general (discussion)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
The amount of volume generated in net.general and net.followup are small
compared to most of the "noisy" groups. I argue that net.general does
indeed serve a useful purpose - and with the monthly postings of "introduction
to posting to net.general", the junk level is pretty low.
I suspect that the REAL solution is to delete net.followup, and have replies
to net.general shunted to /dev/null.
John P. Nelson, Moderator, mod.sources
(decvax!genrad!panda!jpn seismo!harvard!wjh12!panda!jpn)
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (02/18/86)
In article <2219@phri.UUCP> gen-vote@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > [This is a perfect example of a vote which clearly was intended as a "no" > but will get counted as a "yes" because the author didn't follow the > directions on how to format his message. Sorry Mark, but you should know > better. I do *not* want mistakes like this to affect the vote; please read > my previous two articles to make sure you are voting properly -- RHS] Ah, it now borders on ridiculous! As this poll shows such silly management, I suggest that it be boycotted! If a poll-taker is not willing to accept -- and will reverse! -- human-readable votes of obvious intent, they are not in a suitable position to take a poll. [ I am a former Usenet poll-taker and accepted human-readable ballots. ] -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam ~ See the soldier with his gun ~ ~ Who must be dead to be admired ~
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (02/20/86)
The fact is that no matter how explicit the instructions, there will be lots of people who don't follow them. I've taken polls too, and even though I told people to include a string I could grep for, I had to do a lot of hand editing to make my greps work. It's true that I didn't follow the instructions. This is because what I thought I read and what was actually there were different. I thought he was going to grep the body, didn't see his subject, and missed the note about "discussion". Sorry, but I was catching up on 3 weeks of missed news and wasn't dwelling on every word. I promise I'll be more careful next time. Gordon worries that Roy may miscount a vote due to blind use of grep, probably because Roy says he may miscount. But Roy obviously did look at things (however briefly) by hand, since he noticed the mistakes. So he's clearly running the poll responsibly. Nonetheless, I think it's fair of Roy to warn people that they are messing up, in order to cut down on the number of mistyped responses he has to edit by hand. (That's a fair amount of work - I did it recently with the MAC poll.) Mark
gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/22/86)
The deadline for votes on the question "should net.general be deleted
from the list of active newsgroups" is March 1, 1986. Votes must be mailed to
gen-vote@phri.UUCP before midnight on that date to be counted. I'll wait a
few days after that to allow for mail delays and post the results sometime
around March 5th.
Once again, please read <2216@phri.UUCP> for directions on how to
vote. Briefly, send mail to gen-vote@phri with a Subject line that includes
either "delete net.general" or "keep net.general". My goal is to have a shell
script be able to do the vote count, but if it looks like there will be
significant error due to badly formated messages, I'll do manual counting.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016