Anonymous (04/24/83)
#R:cornell:-433800:whuxlb:7700005:000:6080
whuxlb!Anonymous Apr 23 19:37:00 1983
***** whuxlb:net.news / cornell!hal / 5:26 pm Apr 23, 1983
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@crnlcs
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