keithe (04/28/83)
(make that 20 cents worth - this got longer than anticipated...)
It is my belief that most "abuse" of net.general - and of all
netnews, in fact - is because users don't know any better. How many
times have we seen "I'm new to this so please excuse me if..." attached
to a news article. These aren't malicious; they're just ignorant!
Given the above, here's something for consideration: On the
systems I'm familiar with here at Tek, new users are greeted with some
information they need to know about the system, where to look for help,
etc. Couldn't this same kind of thing be placed in the netnews system
so that the first time a user would be greeted with the appropriate
warnings, nettiquette, what-goes-where and other useful information?
Seems simple enough to me, but then, I don't have to implement it!
Regarding the "problem" with net.general as it now stands: the
real source of the problem is that it is EXPENSIVE to use, both in the
money to pay The Phone Company to transmit this stuff all over the
world, and in time to sort through all the crap to get to the Good
Stuff. Why not (re)name it net.expensive, thus reminding people of the
cost involved in using the system.
Here's an idea that just hit me (ouch!). As it stands now,
access to net.general is just too easy. A user correctly ponders, "Why
submit to local.general when I can get to the whole netnews community
with net.general?" The idea of moderators is to reduce this ease of
access. So try this on for size: how about restricting postings to
net.general to those re-submitted from a local.general - after, say,
two or three days had passed? This would work well for lots (most?
all?) sites - those that are part of a local newsgroup, but I don't
know if all sites are so affiliated. (If not, why not?) In this way,
queries, etc. that net.general is designed for ("I'm trying to find a
framus?") would get local exposure first, and if the poster of the
article meets no local success - and a local group should be able to
get responses within that kind of timeframe - the article would be
eligible for resubmission to net.general. Personally I think
moderators for netnews would be a real bottleneck; maybe this
re-submission restriction would let users more-or-less moderate their
own news articles. And the 2-3 day wait probably wouldn't be much
longer than waiting for a moderator to pass on an article.