rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson) (09/04/85)
To keep me from wasting your uucp time stating it over and over, all of the below is my opinion -- flame at me via mail; not on the net -- I'll read and respond. ----------------------- Except for a few VERY radical groups, I think that most people like the concept of peace -- the problem is that very few of them are willing to get up off their butts and do anything about it. Therefore, the idea of peace is not in and of itself really a debatable subject; it is a rather a political issue in our world today. Conclusion #1: Leave peace discussions in net.politics There is, I also believe, widespread interest in the peace movement; wide enough that a lot of people would like to know what is being done and what is going on near enough to them that they could attend. Conclusion #2: Create mod.peace with a stern moderator who only allows announcements of upcoming events and (possibly) short, factual news items on the outcome of prior events. It would be a mini net.announce for peaceniks. In the past two weeks my disk usage here on burl in /usr/spool/news has grown a whopping 7.5 megabytes. TWO WEEKS!! I know that school is coming in, but this has GOT to slow down. Conclusion #3: Lauren is right -- we gotta do something to stop this avalanche; and there is almost nothing we can do with the current environment except moderate everything; which none of us on the "net of the free and the modems of the broke, er, brave" want to see. Let's do what we can to slow this monster down gracefully. For all you peaceniks out there -- if we can really get this diverse mass to cut down on their Usenet traffic, think what unity a common cause like peace could establish!! -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (09/04/85)
Indeed, even I, a big fan of moderated groups, would never propose trying to moderate everything in the current environment. But we can at least try moderation for new groups that have a high volume potential if people are going to INSIST that such groups be created. Ideally, we'd avoid the creation of new groups (high or low volume) unless really necessary under some established criteria. It occurs to me that one possibility to help decide whether or not a group should be created (only one factor, there are many others to be considered as well) might be the following: Perhaps we shouldn't really care about how many absolute votes a newsgroup creation proposal gets. After all, as we've discovered, SOMEBODY will vote for any topic -- getting 20 or 30 or 50 people to say YES isn't hard. But few people who don't care about the topic will bother to vote NO -- they'll just ignore the whole discussion instead. So new groups keep getting created, even when inappropriate. Perhaps one factor in deciding to create a new group should be whether or not the number of SITES (forget individual voters) who had at least one person vote YES exceeds a certain percentage of the total sites on the net. Each site would only really get one vote under this system, since each site only needs to get one copy of any given article. With some work, we might be able to determine thresholds above which netnews distribution make sense, and below which mailing lists make sense. As the net grows, however, it is more and more obvious that we have to take the overall size of the net into account when making these decisions. 50 people was a lot in the early days of the net. Now, it's just a drop in the bucket. --Lauren--