alcmist@ssc-vax.UUCP (Frederick Wamsley) (01/21/85)
Mark Horton and Adam Buchsbaum have objected to the idea of posting guidelines for the use of net.general in a new subgroup of net.general. Their major concerns are that nobody would pay attention, and that anybody who would listen to reason has already been enlightened by net.announce.newusers. Their exact words are below. Whenever Chuq flames in net.general about inappropriate messages there, the traffic goes down for a few weeks. Apparently many people do pay attention to what they read. Certainly net.announce.newusers has helped many newcomers. I'm alarmed to find myself disagreeing with people who know the net as well as Mark and Adam do. I think they are simply underestimating the ignorance of much of the net population. I seriously think there are many people who don't read net.announce.newusers *because they don't know it exists!* I'm thinking of casual users at sites with old software and careless administrators. They start by typing readnews with no arguments, and never see any group but net.general. They have no idea of the extent of the net. Such people obviously exist, since we keep seeing requests in net.general for the list of newsgroups. For everyone who asks there are probably dozens more who don't ask. We need to reach these people before they try to sell their '62 Chevys. Net.general or a subgroup is the only way to do it. Adam is right that a new group, net.general.newusers, is overkill. Would regular articles in net.general be better? Nothing short of a rmgroup will get rid of intentional mispostings. Everything I have said is based on my assumption that ignorance causes a big fraction of the problems with net.general. If the net experts think otherwise, I withdraw my proposal. -Fred Wamsley From Mark Horton: > Posting instructions has never worked before. Most of the problem > comes from people who don't know how to read instructions. > > [followed by a suggestion for a mod.general, to handle messages of > wide interest but not important enough for net.announce] > Mark From Adam Buchsbaum: >What a waste of a newsgroup! The guidelines for using net.general >can be summarized in one article. You want to create a group just >for that? Come on! > >The solution to the whole problem of wasted traffic on the net (of >which net.general is just a small part) can never be solved by >creating more newsgroups. On the contrary, that just increases the >problem. If people aren't reading net.announce.newsusers, then they >aren't going to read net.general.newsusers just because it's in a >different place. -- UUCP:{ihnp4,decvax}!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!alcmist ARPA:ssc-vax!alcmist@uw-beaver I am not speaking as a representative of the Boeing Company or any of its divisions. Opinions expressed are solely my own (if that) and have nothing to do with company policy or with the opinions of my coworkers, or those of the staff of the Software Support Center VAX. (did I leave anyone out? :-))
bytebug@pertec.UUCP (roger long) (01/31/85)
Hadn't we decided to get *rid* of net.general? This was brought up many
moons ago, and most people said they had already unsubscribed to it. Why
is it still around?
--
roger long
pertec computer corp
{ucbvax!unisoft | scgvaxd | trwrb | felix}!pertec!bytebugavolio@grendel.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio) (02/02/85)
alcmist@uw-beaver writes: > ... I seriously think there are many people who don't read > net.announce.newusers *because they don't know it exists!* > ... > I'm thinking of casual users at sites with old software and careless > administrators. They start by typing readnews with no arguments, and > never see any group but net.general... As news administrators know (from installing the software), the news software has built in the ability to specify "mandatory" groups and "default" news groups. net.announce (including the sub-group newusers) is one of those set as "mandatory" in the software distribution. But, there is no way to force site administrators to leave this there so that all new users will see net.announce.newuser. -- Fred Avolio {decvax,seismo}!grendel!avolio 301/731-4100 x4227
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) (02/05/85)
<>
How about a monthly BRIEF summary in net.general of how to use the net
and where to look for more detailed advice (net.announce.newusers)?
Such an article could be no more than 20 lines and would probably have
a strong negative impact on the volume of net.general.
--
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-3695
USENET: {seismo,decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgarychip@t4test.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal) (02/07/85)
A while back there was a discussion on how to stem the tide of commonly
asked suggestions to a newsgroup. I guess net.audio is really suspect
to this. I see a parallel between the "commonly asked questions" and
the "misuse/abuse of newsgroups" problems.
Someone suggested creating a handful of magic article numbers which
would contain the answers to these common questions. The magic
articles would always be there and would be the first thing a new user
would see in the newsgroup. I made a suggestion which would also work
on this problem: use a long expiration date.
If a description of net.general were written and posted with a long
expiration date, new users would see it as their very first article
once the exipration cycle takes hold. No messy inews hacks--no need to
go to other newsgroups.
--
Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara
{cbosgd,idi,intelca,icalqa,kremvax,qubix,ucscc} ! {t4test,t12tst} ! {chip,news}hokey@plus5.UUCP (Hokey) (02/12/85)
In article <1328@t4test.UUCP> chip@t12tst.UUCP writes: >Someone suggested creating a handful of magic article numbers which >would contain the answers to these common questions. The magic >articles would always be there and would be the first thing a new user >would see in the newsgroup. I made a suggestion which would also work >on this problem: use a long expiration date. Not quite; new sites would not have the articles on them. Furthermore, even if the articles were periodically retransmitted, they would not get past the first site which had them on line (duplicate article ...). Next, until many of us are satisfied with the behavior of expire we will continue to run "find" scripts which delete all of the articles which are "too" old. (OK, I guess we could hack the script to ignore articles which met the specs for "keepers".) We could always try do something with a new control message, but I don't know anybody who would want the volume of mail generated when all the "old" news versions reject the unknown control message. Note that these problems would mostly vanish if we had a Wonderful ihave/ sendme protocol. We could even use this same mechanism for automatically maintaining the map information. I can't wait 'til I get enough time to look at sendmail, xfernews, small furry animals with great big teeth... -- Hokey ..ihnp4!plus5!hokey 314-725-9492