reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid) (03/22/88)
Various people who don't exactly know what is going on have ranted and raved
here recently about info-postscript and comp.lang.postscript. Here are the
facts.
1) Info-postscript is an ordinary ARPAnet mailing list, which has grown
too large for its moderator to manage without neglecting his job. So
like all such moderators he has been neglecting the list instead.
2) There is no such newsgroup as comp.lang.postscript. That's right.
You heard me. There is no such newsgroup. So what are you reading now?
Erik Fair of UC Berkeley runs a bi-directional gateway between ARPAnet mailing
lists and NNTP USENET newsgroups. This gateway feeds ARPAnet mailing lists
into NNTP "inet" distribution USENET newsgroups as a way of saving transport
costs of large mailing lists. The newsgroup "comp.lang.postscript" is not
in the official list of legal newsgroups (check the monthly postings by
Gene Spafford in news.lists if you don't believe me). If the ARPAnet mailing
list goes away, then the USENET newsgroup will also go away, because the
USENET newsgroup exists only for the purpose of shadowing the ARPAnet group.
If you people think that comp.lang.postscript is a good idea, then you should
begin the standard "new group creation" process that has been very carefully
documented in news.groups and news.admin. You should petition for the
creation of an official group named "comp.lang.postscript", and go through
the regular voting process. In about a month, with the concurrence of the
USENET backbone, the group will be created and traffic can resume.
The group can exist right now without the approval of the backbone because it
does not travel over backbone links and does not reach every USENET site.
Here are the most recent readership and propagation statistics:
+-- Estimated total number of people who read the group, worldwide.
| +-- Actual number of readers in sampled population
| | +-- Propagation: how many sites receive this group at all
| | | +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
| | | | +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
| | | | | +-- Participation ratio
| | | | | | +-- Cost ratio: $US/month/reader
| | | | | | | +-- Share: % of newsreaders
| | | | | | | | who read this group.
V V V V V V V V
61 10000 914 94% 92 291.1 9 0.20 4.8% comp.lang.postscript
If there are really and truly 10,000 readers of comp.lang.postscript
worldwide, then it shouldn't be too much trouble for the person managing the
vote to get 100 of them to mail their votes to him for presentation to the
backbone.
Brian Reid