furuta (12/05/82)
I must admit that I was rather surprised this morning to receive the rmgroup notification that net.trivia had been removed. On re-reading net.news, I guess it is my own fault for not paying complete attention to the details in the spring cleaning messages. Removal of this group will probably cause some local disgruntled reactions for the following reasons: - we have a number of readers who are quite active participants in the group - we do not receive net.games.all at present since it is blocked somewhere upstream from us - we have now lost the backlog of net.trivia messages, including those which may have arrived just before the ctl message. I would like to raise, as a topic for discussion, ettiquette rules which should be followed when deleting an active newsgroup. I think that someone who wants to delete an active newsgroup, for whatever reasons, must be prepared to expend a substantially greater amount of effort in determining whether or not the group should be deleted than need be expended when deleting an inactive newsgroup. I think that the appropriate sequence of events might be: - discussion initiated in net.news or net.news.group about removing the group. Some sort of concensus reached. - if the concensus is to remove the group, post a call for comments to the group itself and to net.general. Wait a week or two. - if the concensus is still to remove the group, create the group which is to replace it (if any) and post a series of warning messages to the group. Wait a week or two. - delete the group. Send another reminder notification to net.news. Notice that I'm only proposing these steps when an active group is going to be altered. I think it's admirable to put the effort into zapping all the old unused groups and the duplicate groups created by gateways or by typos. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-unix!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)
smk (12/06/82)
Many people here read net.trivia. Who were the vast amounts of people that wanted it to be moved to net.games.trivia? Was it the usual 10 people? What stops me from removing net.general becasue I didn't get 3000 no votes, but I got 4 yes votes??? (I HAVE NO INTENTION OF REMOVING ANY GROUP.) The huge amounts of removals recently from alice!news makes me think the net has an implicit dictator. If they had been actually looking at net.trivia, theyt would see that it is one of the most active newsgroups on the net. I agree that some newsgroups are inactive and should be removed, but if too many active groups are removed, we will end up with one newsgroup. As they say on Hill Street, "Let's be careful out there."
sjb (12/06/82)
Rick has some bonafide beefs in his article. I would merely like to point out that I *DID* three or four weeks ago post a proposal to remove some seemingly dead and unnecessary groups. After getting generally favorable response from that, a week later I submitted a list of groups that I thought should go. net.games.trivia was originally among this. I waited a week for comments, and then submitted an updated list. In this list, net.games.trivia was replaced by net.trivia, as a majority of people thought net.trivia should go. I got more generally favorable response for this so, a week later, (this week), I submitted the rmgroup control messages. As for your specific problem, you can always arrange to get (among other groups) !net.games.all,net.games.trivia which will get you net.games.trivia Adam
ekb (12/06/82)
I had thought that there was plenty of discussion regarding the removal of net.trivia. That is, however, not what I want to discuss. Rick Furuta mentioned that they were cut off from net.games.all somewhere 'upstream' from the Univ. of Wash. systems. I would like to start some discussion on why some newsgroups are being restricted in this way, and whether it really is a good idea. I suspect that this may have been chewed over in the distant past, but it may be a good idea to reexamine it. I assume that the primary reason for such restrictions is to avoid the cost of supporting "unneccessary", "not-work-related" newsgroups. It seems to me that this just encourages people to mis-use existing newsgroups, such as net.general, to get their message across, to to create duplicate newsgroups, such as net.trivia vs. net.games.trivia. (I don't really know which came first.) I'd like to hear from people on those systems who are doing the restricting, those systems 'upstream' from the restrictions, and any one else. - Eric Bustad (houx*!machaids!ekb)
mark (12/06/82)
Obviously, every site has the right to control their own resources, and to refuse to forward certain newsgroups to their neighbors. However, when a site does so secretly, or when a central site does so, it causes problems. If decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver is not getting net.games, since we know that decvax forwards net.games, it must be microsoft that is refusing to pass it along. Clearly, Microsoft has this right. However, since Microsoft is the primary feed for the entire Washington/British Columbia area, they are also preventing these other sites from receiving groups they may want to get. Sites that feed other sites should be especially careful when censoring newsgroups. If the censoring is local in nature, rather than a concerted network-wide effort to kill a newsgroup (e.g. net.jokes.q), the area should seriously consider rearranging itself to make some other site the primary feed. Of course, other issues, like who is going to pay for the phone bill, must be taken into account as well. If someone in the WA/BC area can afford the phone bills, perhaps they can set up a connection with someone in the Portland, Oregon area. I also suggest that if a site refuses to forward certain newsgroups, that this fact should be public knowledge, so that any site downstream knows what they are getting into. I have heard several people claim they don't see some newsgroup for mysterious reasons. Let's remove the mystery. Mark Horton