kaufman@yale.ARPA (El Magnifico Qux) (09/05/85)
Consider this view of the current newsgroup creation problems: Groups that shouldn't be are being created by people who aren't following the accepted newsgroup creation procedure. This is somewhat analogous to some of the signal/noise problems in certain newsgroups: Articles that shouldn't be are being posted by people who aren't following the accepted guidelines for choosing newsgroups, or for withholding articles from the net completely. The latter problem is one of the ones that the moderation experiment is intended to solve, and it seems to be working. I propose that the newsgroup creation problems could be combated by the same method: we could create mod.control for newgrp and rmgrp messages. The control newsgroup would stay around for cancel messages, and in deference to old software the mod.control messages might need to be cross-posted into control (though non-cancel messages in the control newsgroup would want to be ignored by the new software). It seems rather odd to combat newsgroup proliferation by creating a new newsgroup, and I'm not sure the size of the problem warrants it, but the idea of mod.control appeals to me: it seems like the logical extreme of the moderation experiment. Perhaps Those-Who-Lead would like to comment? Qux Kaufman-David@Yale-Comix.Arpa Kaufman@YaleCS.Bitnet ..!decvax!yale!kaufman