brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (12/13/83)
What is this crap about a group not deserving to be top level. I have never understood all this business about levels of newsgroups from the beginning. First of all, the distribution should not have been in the newsgroup name. There are one or two points in favour of that scheme, but the points against it outweigh them I think. What are the advantages of these "levels"? On old software, all they gave you was the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe in one swoop. But the introduction of an Unsubscribe command really eliminates the need for this, I think. "sub"groups appear slowly as a rule, and are quite often very different, so unsubscribing is quite easy and desired. Newer software takes slight advantage of subgroups by making directories slightly smaller. How much is gained by this, I don't know. There is no reason for using "." as the character to map into slash. It would be just as easy to insert a slash every 14 characters in the name, or every 6 or 12 or whatever you like. The outside world need not be concerned with such operating-system dependant implementation details. Now for the disadvantages. There is constant bickering about what should be a subgroup of what. I am amazed at people who say "Make it a subgroup of net.xxx so I can unsubscribe." They waste 100s of times more time and energy posting this than would be required to just type U to the group when it shows up. All these subscription "advantages" are more of a pain, if you ask me. If you want "net.jokes" you've got net.jokes.d whether you ask for it or not. In fact, you have to explicitly request NOT to see it. We all found out the horrible problems that occurred with net.jokes.q due to this! And of course, this doesn't really count as a serious disadvantage, but old software refuses to allow names over 13 characters, so this subgroup crap really limits how we can name subgroups. Thus this net.sf-lovers.drwho debate. What a waste of time. Down with subgroups. If people really want to group newsgroups together in some way, let's implement a useful way. (This message is a silent plug for K news, by the way) -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ontario (519) 886-7304
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (12/17/83)
As far as I know, the major remaining advantage for having subgroups is that sites that only get half the newsgroups can get (or ignore) a whole topic with one short reference, e.g. they can turn off net.rec and net.rec.all by putting !net.rec in the list of what their neighbor sends them. I don't know how many sites out there use this feature. If it's not used very much it's a pretty minor point. Who uses it, and how important is it to you?
thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas) (12/18/83)
This is true - our netnews sys file lines are up their limit, we can't locally refuse any more newsgroups. This is a strong argument for a hierarchical newsgroup structure. Of course, I would like to see the Dr. Who group, and not as a subgroup of SF Lovers, since we don't get SF lovers here through Usenet (we get it over Arpanet). =Spencer