mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (06/24/84)
The overwhelming majority of people are in favor of getting rid
of net.general. Several have raised some valid concerns, but most
of these center around either (1) a misunderstanding of the
situation, or (2) concern about where the traffic will go.
net.announce is moderated, so it won't become a trash can like
net.general is. It could be renamed mod.general, it was origionally
called net.announce because mod wasn't well supported in the sys files.
There are usa and na distributions, but they aren't heavily used and
I suspect many sys files don't implement them. They should fix this.
There are no usa.all or na.all groups because they are intended as
distribution restriction mechanisms for existing net.all groups.
Just unsubscribing to net.general doesn't solve the problem. There
are many places in the documentation and in tradition that point to
net.general. These can't be wiped out. The default subscription
list in readnews includes net.general. People who have little time
to read news get all that junk and usually don't know how to shut
it off.
I think what we're going to want to do is indeed get rid of net.general
(this can be done by rmgrouping it and making sure the backbone sites
really remove it) and provide appropriate places for the traffic.
The purpose of this message is to solicit opinions on how to distribute
the traffic.
Obviously the real net.general stuff belongs in net.announce. (To post
to net.announce, mail the message to cbosgd!announce.) Much of the
stuff in net.general really belongs in a more specific group - hopefully
people will think a little about this when posting to net.general fails.
Some of it is "unimportant things where a wide audience is desired."
Such things probably belong in net.wanted. However, we don't want
net.wanted to be overrun or nobody will read it either, defeating the
purpose of a wide audience.
I suspect we want to divide net.wanted into several categories, so that
people can unsubscribe to some kinds of "wanted" stuff and continue
to subscribe to what interests them. Suggestions for categories are
invited - perhaps "4sale", "comp", "tech", "nontech", "housing".
Improvements to this list are welcome. ("comp" means "computers" and
is included rather than lumped in with "tech" because we have a lot
of computer enthusiasts on this net.)
Also, what do we do about followups ala net.followup? Should they
stay in the same net.wanted newsgroup? Is there a need for followups
to net.announce, and if so, where should they go? The author of an
article can put a Followup-To: header in it to direct followups, but
of course most people won't use this.
By the way, I'd like to thank the people who replied by mail for using
mail rather than news (I didn't even request it.) If you had all
followed up the net would have been flooded. There are a lot of you
out there with good taste and common sense. Please - if you have
something of interest to add to the discussion, go ahead and followup,
but if you just want to vote or flame, send me mail instead.
By the way, there has been considerable comment that having the ability
to group topics by discussion would be useful. 2.11 can indeed do this,
but 2.11 isn't done and won't be soon. (Little is being done on it now.)
I could post the code if there is demand, but beware that this is not
distribution quality. In particular: (1) "unsubscribe to discussion"
isn't implemented, (2) some commands, like "N newsgroup" are broken,
(3) it's big - readnews probably won't fit on anything smaller than
a vax. vnews has most of this code in it, there is a similar feature
in rn.
Mark Hortonnrh@inmet.UUCP (07/11/84)
Given that there's already a "Followup-to:" control line in news, perhaps a useful feature (no, I can't volunteer, we run notes, and er....) for netnews would be the ability to specify that followups are to be MAILED TO THE SENDER. Perhaps: "Followup-to: originator-by-mail" or some such. This would make it necessary for the followers-up to explicitly override the senders preference if they wanted to post news rather than mail to a "mailme" article. Of course, if you pull on the reins too hard, they break....