jkg@gatech.edu (Jim Greenlee) (03/13/88)
I hope everybody will excuse my posting this to comp.binaries itself - I
would ordinarily restrict it to comp.sys, but I think what I have to say
is important (don't we all :-). Please direct follow-ups to comp.sys.ibm.pc.
This is kind of long, so bear with me.
Everybody seems to be missing the point entirely on the moderation issue.
The main reason that groups like this should be moderated is not because
of the decreased likelihood of posting copyrighted programs or trojans or
the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (although these would all be
desirable effects of competent moderation).
The primary reason for moderating a group like this is that the bandwidth
can be controlled. Over the last year or so, the number of sites that have
been added to the net has grown enormously. The direct result is that there
are more and more people who have access to USENET. This is, for the most
part, a Good Thing. However, there has also been a proportional increase in
the number of postings. Depending on your view of the world, this may or may
not be a Good Thing, particularly if you are the one who is paying to have
this stuff transmitted all over creation.
A year ago, our site (gatech), would time out articles after about 3 weeks.
Because of the dramatic increase in the number of postings over the past
year, we are now timing out after about 7-10 days. The talk, soc, and binary
news groups are being timed out after only 3 days. The main reason is because
they generate so much traffic that we can't afford to have those articles
hang around due to the disk space they consume.
A lot of systems administrators start to get really upset when they see one
group that is generating more than about a Megabyte per week (uncompressed)
on average. Ideally, you'd probably like to see an average through-put that's
closer to a half-Meg per week. Encoded binary postings are even worse, because
not only are they usually quite large, they are often immune to compression
(please let's not re-start the compression debates - I don't think anybody
can deny that compressing uuencoded files is usually not worthwhile). Our
news guru informs me that if comp.binaries doesn't smarten up soon, we may
drop it, as will other backbone sites - not because of the risk of posting
"undesirable" software, but because it simply costs too much to transmit in
comparison to the market that it serves.
Then there is the problem of re-posts, especially re-posts of large programs.
A case in point is the Bulletin Board program that was posted recently. Both
postings that arrived at this site were munged. That's about 1.5 Megabytes
worth of wasted disk space, transmission time, and long distance phone bills
for hundreds of sites. The same thing happened a couple of months ago with
the 370 assembler, which was posted (as I recall) three separate times by
two different people. Somebody recently posted a genealogy program in BASIC
interpreter which could just as easily have gone out as plain-text source for
a lot less money. It really starts to add up, folks.
I don't intend to flame the people who posted these packages - I just want
to point out that this wouldn't have happened in a properly moderated forum.
If comp.binaries is going to hang around, then it MUST be moderated - else a
lot of the backbone sites will drop it. This is instant death for any news
group.
Jim Greenlee
--
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