dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) (11/04/85)
I never read net.news, but since seeing the warnings about the possible cuts in net.sources.mac, I decided to investigate, and read through a bunch of articles at my site. In essence, most of the articles could have been deleted; I'll bet no one would care. I saw that groups are likely to be cut because they generate too much traffic, groups are likely to be cut because they don't generate enough traffic. Hm! But the whole discussion made me think, so I decided to try a little experiment: Script started on Mon Nov 4 08:25:56 1985 % cd /usr/spool/news/net % du philosophy 643 philosophy % du abortion 187 abortion % du flame 932 flame % du religion 225 religion/jewish 530 religion/christian 1138 religion (include previous two groups) % du politics 452 politics/theory 1503 politics % du sources/mac 1433 sources/mac Can't argue that some of these groups are definitely heavy-use. Then I tried: % du news 17 news/adm 49 news/b 64 news/config 955 news/group 19 news/newsite 17 news/sa 2 news/stargate 6 news/notes 1478 news Well, well. The net.news* stuff is exceeded in volume only by the politics groups. A very unscientific experiment, of course, but I think this speaks for itself. Most of the discussion in net.news* that I saw was worthless, or worse (my opinion only, of course). If any set of groups is going to be cut, consider some of the "news" groups. By the way, in regard to the fate of net.sources.mac: I have downloaded a lot of stuff from it. I *use* it, and would be quite sad to see it go. -- | Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- | "The voice of the Lord is full of majesty." | Psalm 29:4