hal (04/24/83)
I am very tired of the endless amount of junk in net.general, the
endless discussions about establishing new newsgroups, the never ending
nonsense about whether some topic is appropriate for some newsgroup,
etc. etc. etc...
All the discussions about how to solve these problems seem to concentrate
on controlling newsgroups. And that's not going to work. And it's getting
just as tedious to wade through these pointless discussions as it is to
wade through the flood of articles.
The problem is that there are way too many individual articles to plow
through. It is not yet the case that there is an overwhelming number of
topics under discussion. If the news software grouped individual articles
into topics and if it were possible to say "no I don't want to see this article
or any other articles on the same topic", there would be almost no problem--
I suspect it would even be possible to dispose of net.followup and net.misc,
since these tend to generate a lot of articles on a few topics most of the
time. What is wrong with the news reading programs is that one must spend
hours hitting the `n' key to ignore articles on only 4 or 5 topics. It
should be sufficient to just say `n' once for each topic, and if this worked,
I think that most of the problem would go away. (For example, the
net.startrek group should never have gotten started and there should never
have been a pointless discussion about establishing a newsgroup for Star
Wars related things. There should have been a simple way to say just once
"no I'm not interested in that topic", and then there would have been
nothing to complain about.)
I realize that there is something called "notesfiles" than takes care of
this, but that's not particularly useful if 95% of the sites in the
network don't use it. If the regular news software were able to at least
include the relationship between articles and followups in the message
headers, then it might be possible to use notes to organize the news
and filter through it more conveniently. But I doubt the news articles
will ever be arranged into groups until the standard news programs do it--
it is much easier to convince most sites to install a new version of news
that understands topic grouping than it is to get them all to install
something completely different--like notes.
There are a few other things that need work. First, the relationship
between articles and followups shouldn't be determined by the title of
the articles. As a discussion evolves, people will want to introduce
side topics, and this shouldn't spawn a new topic that those who aren't
interested in have to say `n' to.
Second, the news programs should make at least a minimal effort to
present articles in a rational order. It appears that they are now
presented in the order they are received over UUCP, and since UUCP
appears to ship short articles before long ones, it is common to have
a followup to an article appear before the article. I have never seen
a 10-line correction to an article appear after the original (longer)
article; it always appears first. There's a real simple solution to
this: attach a timestamp to each article showing when it was submitted
to the news programs (NOT when UUCP transmitted it). Then present
related articles in the order they were timestamped.
Third, the software should be fixed so that duplicate articles are
displayed only once. Just once. The current netnews isn't able to
realize when an article has been read in another newsgroup, and presents
it again. This makes a bad situation much worse. (Almost every article
in net.bugs.whatever is posted to net.unix-wizards also, so we all get to
read it twice. Yet there is just enough stuff in each newsgroup that
doesn't appear in the other that I hesitate to turn one of them off.)
So what is the role of newsgroups? I think the best way to look at them
is as a first-level filter so one can scan only the part of the news that
appears to be relevent. If newsgroups are to be useful as a first-level
filter, they must be reasonably narrowly defined. But in that case, posting
a single article to several newsgroups is a normal thing to do, since all
the people you want to reach might not subscribe to a single group but are
likely to subscribe to at least one of a handful of related groups.
And for this reason, the news software must correctly avoid displaying
an article more than once.
When should new newsgroups get formed? Rarely. Certainly not whenever
someone wants to discuss something new. Why is it that when someone wants
to talk about something they have to get the net's permission to set up a
new newsgroup? That's silly. Just start talking about it in some random
place (net.misc? but see below). If it persists long enough, then maybe
it's time to think about starting a new newsgroup. A new newsgroup shouldn't
be needed too often. It ought to be something like giving tenure to a long-
term discussion.
OK, so what about net.general, net.followup, and net.misc? The only
reason that I can see for these groups to be separate and not just
a single group called net.general is that the news software is not
capable of organizing related articles into groups that can be ignored
as a unit, and since this problem exists, something had to be done to
keep from flodding net.general with a lot of messages on individual
topics. Maybe something like net.misc is needed as a good place for
random discussions, but net.misc tends to have only a few active discussions
at a time, each of which has many messages. If grouping were available,
it wouldn't be difficult to turn these discussions off one by one.
Enough. The point I'd like to get across is that it's time to stop
debating newsgroup rules. It's time to start solving the problem. And to
do that, there has to be something done to organize the flood of messages
into a reasonable trickle of topics.
Hal Perkins
uucp: {decvax|vax135|...}!cornell!hal
arpa: hal@cornell
bitnet: hal@crnlcsmark (04/24/83)
Notesfiles won't solve the problem. Even if notesfiles were being supported and maintained, and even if it were shown to work in a 500 machine environment, the problem is not too many followups in net.general. The problem is simply too many diverse, inconsequential topics. Look at what's been posted there recently. No person could possibly be interested in what's there enough to want to read it. For Pete's sake, the entire continent of Europe has decided that there is nothing of value in that newsgroup! We currently have no way of reaching the entire network - the newsgroup that was created for exactly that has been so polluted that it has been shut off! They have the option of running notesfiles if they want. Some sites over there probably do. It obviously doesn't help. "It is not yet the case that there is an overwhelming number of topics under discussion." Obviously it is, if you are among the many people who have turned off net.general. Such people do not have time for such babble. Such people aren't even reading this, because they dropped out long ago. Some of us have much higher tolerance than most; we are the only one left reading net.general. "If the regular software were able to at least include the relationship between articles and followups". You must be running a 1980 vintage of netnews at Cornell - there has been a "References" line for a long time in news headers, indicating followups. Notesfiles could use it, but without support, notesfiles hasn't been taught about it. And of course, there are people like you, Hal Perkins, who do not bother to use the followup mechanism, but just post a fresh article. Neither news nor notes is able to figure out what you are following up, since you skirted the mechanism. You aren't alone in doing this. "the news programs should make at least a minimal effort to present articles in a rational order. .. since UUCP appears to ship short articles before long ones, it is common to have a followup to an article appear before the article". You ought to at least check out your facts before rambling. UUCP ships in directory order, which is usually the order of presentation, but sometimes random. Berknets ship shortest job first, but they don't account for much of Usenet. In fact, B news goes to great pains to present the articles by newsgroup. They should be further sorted, and someday they will be. That will help net.misc a lot. It will bring it down to the point where net.misc is no worse than net.general is today. And all the time stamp information is present in news headers, and has been for years. "the software should be fixed so that duplicate articles are displayed only once". This fix has been there for over a year. But if Cornell runs ancient software, of course they won't have the fix. And nothing helps if people insist in POSTING the article more than once (except the human moderator I'm suggesting) which they often seem to do.
hal (04/24/83)
As far as I can tell, Cornell makes a decent effort to run current versions of software like news. I'm pretty sure we are running something like 2.8 or 2.9. And it doesn't work. And it has a bad user interface--it won't sort out anything by topics, which means lots of time spent saying no to dozens of replies on one topic. As to why I am so inconsiderate as to post an article instead of a followup: there is no way when reading the news to figure out if I've seen the last article on a given topic. I think it is slightly more considerate to at least read through the articles to avoid posting redundant followups if somebody else has also touched on the topic. But if I do this, there is no way to post a followup--it's too late. The news software presents the articles in whatever order it sees fit without telling me that this is the last article on some topic, so I am left to guess whether it is appropriate to use the `f' key or to wait. I suppose I could just hit `f' when I get the urge instead of waiting. Is that better? I'm afraid that I might not be qualified to participate in this discussion since I am only one of the folks who actually uses the software and doesn't know the details of how it works. I was hoping that some consideration would be given to the suggestion that related articles be grouped together so it would be easier to filter the news. Instead, the only replies suggest that Cornell does an inept job of keeping its software up to date (which is not true). Hal
trb (04/25/83)
"All of Europe" didn't decide to refuse net.general, a few Europeans decided to refuse net.general for a lot of other Europeans. Let's take a look at cost and reason. Data from my latest (July 1982) phone book: At their most expensive, residential rate calls from New Jersey to the UK cost $2.08 first minute $1.26 each additional minute, at night they cost $1.25/$.76. That's as opposed to $.74/$.49 premium $.29$/.20 night here to Seattle WA. So, using lowest residential rates (which I assume these folks would, being so economy conscious) let's assume that one of these links transmits 40 minutes of news a night (20 minutes is probably much more likely, I transmit about 25 minutes a day at 1200 baud, at less than 120 cps to a few systems) so it would cost about $31 per night in phone bill. For a whole year that's well under $12000 a year. $12000 is something like 1/10 of my loaded salary (what Western Electric Co pays to keep me for a year, NOT just my paycheck). I'm sure that all of Europe would get more value out of a years worth of netnews that it would get by having me work at one place for 4 weeks. So it's not much of a cost to transfer netnews to all of Europe. Rumor has it that there's lots of people in Europe, I never been there but I seen 'em on TV. (Maybe the Lady Arwen Fan Club could send me there. Just kidding, I can afford it, I work for the Bell System.) Let's say that the people in Europe are so busy that they don't want to read all our trash netnews, only the good stuff. OK, let someone at their forwarding site moderate the netnews. Real easy to do, just have him read all the important groups (including net.general), and vote go/no-go on each article to be forwarded. So trivial it's trivial. Yea, netnews has too much trash on it, but thar's gold in these here hills. You just gotta be patient. Rather than just telling all these haughty continental types where they can go, I figured I'd offer the fruits of my extremely vast creativity. Of course they won't get to read this because they think no one posts anything but trash to net.general. If you have any friends in Europe who care, feel free to forward them this. Again, there are some features of netnews that really stink, like all the mindless drivel that's posted (why are you looking at me like that?) but I really don't think that there is any better alternative. Running netnews as a "well-controlled high-priced military dictatorship" doesn't count as a better alternative in my book, but I fear that one day some mindless stout-chested drone will try to break it up and might succeed to some extent. It's also possible that user irresponsibility will cause the demise of netnews, but we can always deal with irresponsible users but we can't always deal with mindless stout-chested drones. This (long) message will take about 30 seconds to transmit and would cost a dollar tops to send it to Europe. Happy Hacking, Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
mjb (04/26/83)
Now slow down you lot...
I read net.general and I'm in Europe (at least that's what the atlas
and the goverment both say) so to say that Europe isn't getting net.general
is wrong.
net.general reaches the UK via mcvax and then gets passed on to every site
linked into ukc. (Some sites ONLY take net.general.) So it isn't the
European gateway turning it off, and the UK gateway isn't either.
that's the end of the hard facts, now for my personal opinion...
In the states you've got it lucky, USENET is established and known to pass
useful information around - which is how you justify your link into it.
Over here, even though we invented democracy, networks like USENET are only
just starting up, and we have to fight to get the money for the phone calls,
modems, diallers etc. The boss then looks to see what he gets for his money
and finds he's been offered car rides to Chicago, and does he know if fred
still works at Bell? Fortunately I have an understanding boss, but some sites
don't and that is why they are complaining.
So what do I think should happen to net.general?
Keep it, don't rename it, but think about what you're posting.
Most of what we don't want to see fits into other newsgroups better,
and in any case gets complained about by Americans as well!
Mike Bayliss Kent University, England (which is part of Europe)
...!{decvax!mcvax,lime}!ukc!mjb