riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (03/01/85)
Regarding one of jj's suggestions: > 2) There MUST be a database of ALL newsgroups. The first > message in every new group should state what that group isintended > for. The complete collection of all such articles should be available > on line, and outside of postnews, for the interested to peruse. I think that this is a good idea. In the meantime, though, a small step in that direction is already available: Gene Spafford's "List of Active Newsgroups", which is regularly posted to net.news.group and mod.newslists. Admittedly, most novice and ignorant users don't read net.news.group or mod.newslists, so here at ut-sally we've made things easier for them: we've added a small hack to vnews that prominently displays the description from the list as each newsgroup comes up in a session of reading news. A shell script automatically grabs Spaf's list as it arrives on our system every two weeks and installs it in a file for vnews to find. Since the descriptions can be multi-line, we've added warnings for the problematic newsgroups like net.sources and net.general; new Usenetters on sally no longer have an excuse for confusing them with net.wanted.sources and net.misc. Rumor has it that the next release of news software (2.10.3, I suppose) will include the newsgroup description hack. So keep your eyes peeled... --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") --- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle --- riddle@ut-sally.UUCP, riddle@ut-sally.ARPA, riddle%zotz@ut-sally
zben@umd5.UUCP (03/02/85)
>> ... The complete collection of all such articles should be available ...
Who is going to pay for the mass-storage for all the articles ever entered?
I think this is highly unreasonable...
--
Ben Cranston ...seismo!umcp-cs!cvl!umd5!zben zben@umd2.ARPA