woods (12/15/82)
Although I agree that Adam (and I believe that's Bushbaum, not Buchanan,
correct me if I'm wrong, Adam) probably shouldn't have taken matters into his
own hands. However his actions did do one good thing: they made the USENET
community aware, in a way that no amount of discussion could have, that
many people feel that the proliferation of newsgroups is a *serious* problem.
I've said this before, but there are obviously a lot of new users on the
net, so I'll say it again: the options line in my .newsrc file is already
as long as it can be, I can't unsubscribe to any more groups. I don't want
to create a line of the form net.1 net.2 net.3 either, because then I won't
see any new groups. Besides it's only a matter of time before *that* method
would hit the limit as well.
The major point of this article is that although some discussion on the
issue at the next USENIX meeting is certainly appropriate, I don't want to
see any decisions made there that will affect USENET without the USENET
community being allowed to have a say. I for one cannot attend the USENIX
meeting, much as I would like to. Since I am not a systems programmer, and
the institution I work for is a tight-budget scientific reasearch organization,
I seriously doubt that they would appropriate funds for me to go. I am sure
that I am a more active user of the net than any people from our site that
would be at USENIX, and I don't think it is fair for decisions to be made
regarding USENET's future without being allowed to have a vote of some sort.
GREG
ucbvax!hplabs!hao!woods
menlo70!hao!woods
harpo!seismo!hao!woods
decvax!brl-bmd!hao!woodssjb (12/16/82)
I don't think I took matter into my own hands. I asked people about it by submitting proposalS (note the plural) to the net and then took action corresponding to the OPINIONS THAT I RECEIVED IN RESPONSE. BTW, to quell some BIG uncertainties, my name is spelled Buchsbaum, not Buchbaum, Bushbaum, Bushsbaum, Buxbaum, Buchanan (now THAT'S a new one!), etc. etc. etc. Sigh
mark (12/16/82)
Good grief, folks, this is not "net.let's pick on Adam". C'mon, now! Adam did ask before he leaped. He also discussed it with me beforehand, and I encouraged him to do the rmgroups. If you're going to flame at somebody, flame at me. It is recognized that it would be better to have a local newsgroup archival scheme (so that idle newsgroups get put on an "idle" list and don't affect netnews speed) than to have rmgroup around. Nobody has written one yet, and until somebody puts their code where their mouth is, we're stuck with the current state of affairs. The collision between cca's "local" fa newsgroups and the rmgroups on fa.info-terms and friends was unfortunate, but both sides erred. Adam should have posted the message to fa.msg.ctl instead of net.msg.ctl, so it wouldn't have gone to cca. (Of course, he had no way of knowing that it would make a difference.) Steve is also walking on thin ice by admitting things to USENET standard newsgroups like fa.info-micro and then passing them on to other hosts, who might in turn pass them on to the rest of USENET, resulting in two copies of every article. (In fact they don't, but you never know who someday will.) By the way, I have seen a lot of flaming about how we should have lots and lots of newsgroups, and readnews should be written in such a way that there can be thousands of newsgroups with no degradation in speed. But I haven't seen anybody come up with even an algorithm for doing this, much less any code. Stop griping unless you have a better way. Mark Horton