jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) (11/04/85)
I have two suggestions. 1) Make the number of readers one of the main criteria in deciding whether to trash newsgroups. It's easy for someone with superuser powers at each site to snoop eveybody's .newsrc files and see what the "circulation" of each newsgroup is at that site, i. e., the number of subscribers. Although counting the circulation could be done manually at first, later revisions of the news software could have the ability to respond to control messages ordering a count of circulation with results to be mailed somewhere (or more reliably albeit expensively, distributed on a special newsgroup). A central person could total the counts from all the sites and publish a summary. 2) Modify the news software to allow anyone to cancel any article. Boy, that would encourage politeness and brevity. Someone would reflexively cancel any duplicate articles. The same fate would befall anything that said, in all caps, to replace anything with anything else, and the articles that completely quote some article, then don't add anything decipherable.
jeff1@garfield.UUCP (11/15/85)
In article <827@rlgvax.UUCP> jack@rlgvax.UUCP (Jack Waugh) writes: >2) Modify the news software to allow anyone to cancel any article. Unfortunately, that would only cut down on the number of articles seen. A canceled article still gets distributed to everyone, and then the cancellation comes along and removes it. However, by now the article has been batched and/or sent on to other sites. Has anybody modified the news software so that it doesn't do this? Maybe a list of canceled articles could be kept, and before actually sending the batched article, make sure it's not in the list. This would cut down on traffic a bit. (especially if it's done by the backbone sites) Maybe not a whole lot, but every little bit helps. This would also get rid of cancellation messages. We don't get all the newsgroups, but we still get cancellations for all of them since they are sent through control. Jeff Sparkes jeff1@garfield.UUCP jeff1@garfield.mun.cdn <- CDNnet