stevenm (12/11/82)
Well, here is the digest of responses to my article on the
problem of proliferating newsgroups. There were about 30 direct responses,
and there were about 10 others which were posted to the net.
First, a quote from one of the reponses:
"Finally, the idea of control of newsgroups seems to be in com-
plete opposition to the whole concept of insanity, chaos, and general
anarchy which we call the usenet. I don't like the idea of centrilized
control of the net. It would tend to make the net as sterile and anti-
septic as the ARPAnet. And I think that would be a terrible tragedy."
The responses, of course, ran the gamut from total agreement to
personal abuse. A majority of the respondees seemed to agree that
completely unrestricted creation of newsgroups is a problem, since
the existence of an additional group does consume a certain amount
of resources. Most positive respondees thought that a 'sunset' policy
on newsgroups (no activity for a given period results in removal of
a newsgroup) was in order.
A number of people, of course, didn't consider rampant newsgroup creation
a problem. Indeed, many of these people contained that if it weren't
possible to easily create a newsgroup, inappropriate discussions would
take place in other newsgroups, polluting them.
Few respondees explicity addressed my idea of making low-volume
newsgroups into mailing lists. I was disappointed that this idea is
not being taken more seriously. A set of ARPA-like mailing lists,
coupled with an periodic listing of them posted to the net would
probably better serve the interests of readers of special-purpose
groups. Alas, this idea seems destined to die on the vine.
A few people accused me, in various ways, of sponsoring censorship.
I certainly do not see this to be the case. It is amusing and ironic
that hardly a discussion about the net can arise these days without
someone yelling 'Censorship!! Bit-burning!!'.
By the way, I don't believe that anyone has any intentions here of
touching groups other than 'net.all,fa.all'. Indeed, local groups
are a fine thing. Some people were afraid that I was going to take
away their local ability to create machine-local and other non-global
groups. I had no such intention.
Enough of my prattle. I have enclosed below slightly edited versions
of the notes I recieved, for your perusal. Hit the delete key
now, because there are about 500 lines of text here.
As for me, I am no longer interested in the topic. Please do not
reply to me with regard to this subject. My intention was to
provoke serious thought on the problem, and that has been accomplished.
Long live the net.
S. McGeady
P.s. - These messages have been somewhat edited, to remove redundant
sentiments, libels, and to save space.
------- Forwarded Messages
From: teklabs!cbosg!nuucp!cbosgd!mark
For what it's worth, (2) [disallowal of automatic creation of groups,
coupled with ignoring disallowed groups - mcg] is already in 2.10.
As to (3) [increasing the mandatory minimum number of responses - mcg],
you have to consider that the number of people who take the trouble to vote
is less than the number who would participate. Once the newsgroup
is created, people get drawn into the conversation. This is not
saying that the net might still have been better off if the group
were never created.
It is a valid claim that the netnews software should be such that
it costs zero to have another group, so long as this new group does
not cause extra traffic (e.g. we move something from net.misc to
net.politics). The current software is not, alas, this good.
Mark
------- Message 2
From: teklabs!tekcad!franka
Subject: Restrictions on group formation
I feel that restrictions on formation of new groups is a mistake.
The main problem is that this will not keep junk articles off the net. A
user will simply start submitting articles on dead babies to net.general
and create even more flames.
I am still unclear as to why it is so necessary to remove limited
interest groups. If one chooses not to read them one can unsubscribe. If
old versions of news cannot handle this proliferation of news groups,
their sites can unsubscribe to whatever newsgroups they choose (one could
ask why they aren't keeping up with new news releases and besides, I don't
think that twenty or thirty sites who haven't caught up to the rest of the
net should dictate newsgroup policy).
I find personally abhorrent any of your "improvements" to
the net. I don't think that one should put the power to create new news-
groups in the hands of a few "major" sites. Deciding who is a major site
alone is a problem in itself. I also don't think that site managers should
have any more power than they already have (i.e., the power to accept,
reject, forward, or not forward news groups). If they decide they don't
want to accept certain groups, fine. Let them do it for their own machine,
though. The use of mailing lists is also not a very good solution. One
of the nicest features of the net is that if someone creates a group, you
know immediately and can either subscribe or unsubscribe. Assume the
following scenario. Somebody decides to create a new newsgroup, say net.ai
(for artificial intellegence discussions). There is a number of people
who are interested, but not so many as to justify a new newsgroup. So
the instigator starts a mailing list. Now the whole thing disapears from
public sight, going underground by mail. A new net user (or maybe just
somebody who missed the news for a few days) has absolutely no way to
find out about this list, even though he may be quite interested.
Finally, the idea of control of newsgroups seems to be in com-
plete opposition to the whole concept of insanity, chaos, and general
anarchy which we call the usenet. I don't like the idea of centrilized
control of the net. It would tend to make the net as sterile and anti-
septic as the ARPAnet. And I think that would be a terrible tragedy.
Well, you asked for opinions,
Frank Adrian
Tektronix, Inc.
------- Message 3
From: teklabs!cbosg!nuucp!houxt!3133rvh
I don't really understand the problem with proliferating newsgroups. In
fact, creation of a new newsgroup makes it easier for me to track topics
I'm interested in and avoid those I wish to avoid.....
Since it seems to be a fairly simple operation to kill a newsgroup
when it's no longer needed, I would rather encourage creation of temporary
groups to aid in message clarification than discourage their creation
without the support of half the net sites.
Am I missing something? Does the existence of a newsgroup (especially
a dead one) take up so many resources somewhere that we should inconvenience
ourselves to avoid their presence?
Rick Huber
------- Message 4
From: teklabs!decvax!microsof!uw-beaver!furuta
I think that most of the people who create new newsgroups act quite
responsibly although a few tend to create new newsgroups
without thinking it through or judging response (the creation of net.social
is one such incident). Centralizing netnews responsibility seems like it
creates as many problems as it solves. Perhaps a way to slow down these
people who create many newsgroups would be in order (limit the number of
newsgroups a site can create in a year or some such)?
--Rick
------- Message 5
From: teklabs!decvax!pur-ee!pucc-h.acg
I share your concern about the over proliferation of news groups.
Undoubtably, this topic will come up at the Unicom meeting in
January, but if you can get a consensus before then, more power
to you. To wit, I offer the following random thoughts:
1) Establishing a "sunset" policy. That is, all new news topics
die after "x" months unless a large enough numbers of net sites
feel it worth keeping.
2) Establish a hard bottom limit for the number of articles per
month for a given group. Below this the group is automatically
terminated. The problem with this is that people may submit
"bogus" articles just to keep their favorite group alive.
3) Establish a bottom limit for the number of sites that submit to
a group in a month. If the number of different contributing sites
is any indication of interest, groups that don't get the requisit
number of site submissions are not interesting to most of the net.
4) Split the net into "tech" and "non-tech" branches. Net membership
for a site would be defined as recieving all "tech" articles.
The transmission of "non-tech" material would be left to each
site's preferences.
I don't know if this is exactly the type of input you were looking for, but
I decided to put my two cents in anyway.
- Jeff Schwab
------- Message 6
From: jons (Jon Steinhart)
One thing that would really help would be to make posting to news a restricted
action. This is mainly to keep incoming college freshmen from pissing off the
rest of netland. This shouldn't hurt as long as read and mail permissions
remain. Anyone would be able to respond to an author by mail. Permission to
post to local newsgroups should also remain. Down with special interest groups!
Jon
------- Message 7
From: teklabs!decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!wagner
I agree with you that 22 yes votes is not enough. I am running
a special-interest group (for folkdancers) as a mailing list.
There are about 15 people on it, and there certainly isnt enough
interest or traffic to talk about a newgroup. I dont know if
the right number is 100 or 200 or 300, but I think that you
would find that many more people would respond if they really
thought their response would make a difference.
I never respond to requests for new groups, because they always
seem to assume that five of their friends are enough to form
a group.
Maybe a criterion for new groups should be added to the etiquette
document.
Michael Wagner, UTCS
------- Message 8
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!decvax!yale-comix!debenedi
RE: your hostile note about proliferation . . .
gee, let's be nasty! and unfriendly! have fun discarding this letter.
Robert DeBenedictis
------- Message 9
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!simon
I'd like to reply to your comments about my proposal for a new group.
As far as I know there is no agreed upon minimum for the number of votes
needed to create a newsgroup. Until some standard or convention is adopted
we should let new groups be created relatively freely but then apply
a "survival of the fittest" algorithm ... Anyway first I think the
number of replies I received is comparable to that received by others,
...
I view a newsgroup as being like a keyword facility in an information
retrieval system, I don't imagine you would want to restrict such keywords
to a minimum frequency of occurence (in fact the really useful keywords
are those that are uncommon). Probably our disagreement is due to different
views of the net. You seem to think that an article is only worthy if it
is read by some large percentage of the net, I view the net as a large
body of information, 99% of no interest to me, and requiring a very
stringent filter.
Simon Gibbs, DCS, U. of Toronto
------- Message 10
From: teklabs!decvax!ittvax!slack
I agree substantially with the idea of (a) general administrator(s)
However there is a tradeoff between number of newsgroups and
number of articles that appear on a news group. I believe
that I may recieve fewer postings of no interest to me,
a desireable situation than I would if only a very few nets existed.
It may be wise to be rather free in creating new nets, after some
control has been established. One never really knows which group
will be well used untill it has had a chance to be available for
some time.
Tom Slack decvax!ittvax!slack
------- Message 11
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!decvax!harpo!druxn!kak
Most newsgroups arn't worth anything anyway,. I find the ones that
the most likely to be useful are the ones which are LOCALLY CREATED for
local use. You arn't talking about taking this ability away, are you?
Kris A. Kugel
------- Message 12
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!lime!burdvax!hdj
You are one who clearly does not understand netnews. It is a free-form,
unedited, uncensored information service. To limit creation of newsgroups
to a few elite sites would be contrary to the netnews philosophy.
... don't try to prevent us from doing whatever we please on the net.
When people like you try to tell me what I can say and how I can say it,
I won't put up for it. I know there are many others that share this view.
Herb Jellinek (:-(
------- Message 13
From: teklabs!harpo!floyd!trb
Steve,
Your argument is flawed. I think that 20 responses is plenty to start
a new group. Most people who read news do not post (or mail).
There is no way to predetermine whether a new group will be
a success. There is should be no problem with group proliferation,
because if a group becomes popular then that group is worthwhile, if it
dies, then it should wither away gracefully (under automatic control of
netnews). This would be EASY to implement....
Andy
------- Message 14
From: teklabs!ucbvax!sdcarl!rusty
you forgot another alternative: let these people create these
short term newsgroups that will die out after a while and have
the netnews software automatically remove the spool directory,
. files, remove it from the active file, remove the entry for
it from the .newsrc files, and fix/remove any other files for
that newsgroup, after that newsgroup hasn't had a submission
for a "long time".
------- Message 15
From: teklabs!ogcvax!hp-pcd!tw
This is indeed a problem, however, if we did modify the software to
disallow creation of new groups, how would we get people to install it?
There seem to be quite a few sites still running obselete versions of
news. Sigh.
Tw Cook
------- Message 16
>From steve Mon Dec 6 11:53:25 1982
Steve: There is no way to prevent any user on any machine from creating
a new news group...
As I understand B-news at least as implemented here, I cannot post articles
to a news group that doesn't exist. (Maybe I just haven't figured out how.)
If I want to defeat this, therefore, I go out ... [Mr. DenBeste proceeds
to explain a way that any user can create a new group. - mcg]
Nonetheless, I feel that the correct solution is as you said - only
let certain sites create new groups. I would tend to vote for the
Berkely sites. I don't care if cbosgd!mark has that power ... as long
as there are others.
Perhaps a different approach would be as follows: When an article is
received on any given machine for a group that doesn't currently exist,
rather than automatically creating it, refer it to the system administrator.
Interestingly enough, this enforces your 200-sites suggestion,
because if enough sites don't have the group, it won't be able to
pass around the net and will die automatically.
------- Message 17
From: steveb (Steve Biedermann)
Personally, I think that 100 SITES is way too restrictive.
I think half that is more appropriate. I'm also not sure if I agree
with the philosophy of counting sites rather than individuals. (I think
the number of *individuals* should be around 100).
I think the best solution would be to only allow the
administrators on selected trunk sites create newsgroups. And DEFINATELY
have news `return to sender' articles posted to nonexistant news groups.
------- Message 18
From: tekcrd!teklabs!charliep
Another possibility is to put a "expiration date" on newsgroups as
well as news articles. This would automatically do your spring housecleaning
and would perhaps even encourage temporary groups. I am biased in favor
of the free usage of the network, and free dissemination of information.
Censorship seems such a crude muddle.
However, I too get tired of LBJ's. I think that this problem, and your
problem, is really just a symptom caused by growing pains, and with
time the network will mature in many (perhaps unforeseeable) ways.
------- Message 21
From: teklabs!pur-ee!scott
It's certainly true that if you required a quorum to
initiate a new news group that most of the newgroups
currently in existence wouldn't be. But personally,
there are a lot of low frequency news groups (net.lang.lisp
for example) that very few people would respond to, but
occasionally very interesting things crop up. I think
that what would end up happening (and you're probably
going to get n copies of this same comment) is that you'd
drive the discussions that are in the peripheral newsgroups
into the mainstream groups.
Scott Deerwester
------- Message 22
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!jcw
I'm strictly a user, so perhaps I don't realize the full implication
of what creating a newsgroup means. If it means additional burden on
the system administrators at every site, then rules (i.e., minimum numbers
of readers, etc.) may be necessary. Or is it just the burden of
transmitting so much stuff to every site?
>From my user's perspective, I don't want to see newsgroups that are of
no interest to me. However, if there are twenty people out there
interested in a particular subject, I'd rather see them with a
newsgroup, because I don't want to see that subject in net.general
or net.misc.
------- Message 23
From: tekcrd!teklabs!ucbvax!decvax!harpo!seismo!uwvax!reid
I agree with you, although I would like to reserve one point.
Of all the newsgroups I read, I think that very *few* of them have more than
22 contributors, most of the time. There tend to be a few people who drop
their words of wisdom everywhere, a few people who contribute when appropriate,
and a host of people who just like to read the news....
It does seem silly that such a newsgroup get sent to a site where nobody reads
it, but if your policy is upheld too stringently, the net might degenerate
into a few heavily-trafficked, very general groups, which would be self-
defeating. My feeling is that it is great to have many subgroups, but that
they should be *used*. I don't know exactly what to suggest to assure this.
I think that the idea of an administration overseeing the creation of new
groups is good. An alternative that would require no modification to software
might be to adopt a policy to 'mercilessly crush' newsgroups created without
permission which are being used sparsely if at all. I don't know what 'per-
mission' might be defined as....
Glenn Reid
...seismo!uwvax!reid
------- Message 25
From: tektronix!teklabs!ucbcad!microsof!fluke!ssc-vax!james@decvax.uucp
An alternative would be to have each site create a special request file
that would list all users at that site who wished to see a special
purpose newgroup. When an item came through in that newsgroup the
local news handler would send all the "subscribers" to that group
mail containing the item. This solution has the advantage of being
a "distributed" system - i.e., if a given site had enough interest
the system administrator could make that newsgroup "public".
James Thiele
------- Message 26
From: teklabs!decvax!ittvax!swatt
Really? 22 replies? It must be time to start a newsgroup ...
- Alan
------- Message 29
From: teklabs!decvax!duke!mcnc!jte
I agree with you totally that the 22-say-yea syndrome has gotten
out of hand. The number-of-sites-that-want-it rule is the way to go,
however, since this is not a star network (!) it can
become profitable to start newsgroups for fewer sites than 100.
Suppose two sites decide to start a "newsgroup" but since
there is no other interest, they mail instead.
If the sites are neighbors, fine. Otherwise, the intermediate
sites will receive the "news" anyway and can be counted as
"wanting" it. The more outlying sites that want a newsgroup,
therefore, the more reason to agree to its creation.
I would say if one added up all the sites that want a group,
as you suggest, added all the intermediate nodes between
those sites, and that number was > ~33% of the net, then create it.
Of course, we are assuming either intelligent mailers that
avoid duplicate mailing, or possibly lots of local aliases
for re-distribution.
Changes to netnews? Yes, that's where the fix is really needed
but until someone completely re-writes news to incorporate
the many other changes needed as well, we will not be able
to replace the existing news systems.
Jim Ellis
[Note: duke!jte is one of the original authors of the news system,
I believe. - mcg]
------- Message 30
From: teklabs!decvax!mcnc!swd
1) I agree that mailing lists should be strongly encouraged
unless the number of sites and/or people who want
the group is large.
2) I do not think that limiting which sites can create
news groups is a good idea.
3) We should be careful not to come down too hard,
some groups that seemed (to me) rather pointless
at first have had great success.
------------ End of Messages --------------------