furuta@umcp-cs.UUCP (Rick Furuta) (11/04/85)
As moderator of the laser-lovers newsgroup, I want to make a few comments about the conversion of fa groups to mod groups. mod.computers.laser-printers should now be receiving the laser-lovers messages through a gateway loated at Berkeley. For the moment, I have also retained the fa.laser-lovers feed through uw-beaver. Messages gatewayed in at Berkeley seem to have different propagation patterns than those gatewayed in at uw-beaver. I am retaining both feeds for the moment to make sure that those people who were reading fa.laser-lovers can also see mod.computers.laser-printers and that unexpected delays are not introduced in the amount of time it takes messages to reach them. A number of anti-social Usenet sites are presently dumping large numbers of error messages on me. When these quiet down and when I get a chance to poll the Usenet readership to make sure that nothing unexpected has happened, I will then be glad to remove the fa.laser-lovers feed leaving only the mod.computers.laser-printers one. I was one of the recipients of the original off-line messages proposing the shift from fa.* groups to mod.* groups. At the time of that discussion, I did raise the question of why "laser-lovers" was being renamed "laser-printers". I didn't really get an answer that satisfied me but then I also was too busy to push for one. It now seems to me that the current naming scheme has already been cast into concrete. The laser-lovers name, while admittedly cute, has been attached to the list for quite a long time. I didn't choose the name (it predates my tenure as list moderator) but I think that it has served us well. For one, it has kept our charter broad. We discuss more than the printers themselves, also discussing matters of broader interest to those interested in laser-printers. One example of an interesting topic that falls under the "laser-lovers" aegis, but probably not under the "laser-printers" one is that of font design. Another is the discussion of typesetter technology, which technically does not fall into the category of laser printers but is of concern to those interested in laser printers. Long-term readers of laser-lovers (before it was gatewayed into the Usenet) may recall that the question of whether or not to gateway into the Usenet was one of some controversy. On balance, I think that the move was to the benefit of the list as a whole as I believe we picked up some half dozen to dozen truly top rate contributors to the list. However, I'd also have to say that the ratio of top rate contributors to total readership is much larger on the Arpanet side than on the Usenet side. And Usenet readers seem to have a shorter memory than Arpanet readers because of the transient nature of Usenet articles. Still, Usenet readers contribute enough to laser-lovers that I feel it'd be a bit pointless to refuse to gateway laser-lovers into Usenet. In summary, I would prefer if the list were named something other than mod.computers.laser-printers since both the "computers" part and the "laser-printers" part seem inaccurate in describing what the list has been used for in the past and because the naming doesn't retain the correspondence between the two lists. However, the unfortunate reality of Usenet is that it is very hard to make a decision and even harder to change one once it's been made. Whatever the eventual name for the group, my commitment is to do whatever I can to make sure that the group's messages are posted and distributed in a timely fashion. --Rick