minow (04/24/83)
Mark's recent suggestion to do something about the clutter on the net prompts me to drag up some suggestions that have been running through my mind while mindlessly typing the 'n' key as I schlepp throught the hugh amount of junk that passes for "news" these days. I would like to propose that each site originating news appoint a "net administrator" who bears two responsibilities: 1. Responsible to local users for managing connections, and deciding which groups are available locally. 2. Responsible to the global community for articles posted from the administrator's machine. To prevent local users from abusing the net, the administrator will have to setup access lists, allowing certain people to submit directly, certain people to submit indirectly, and others to have only read-news priviliges. Of course, access lists could permit unrestricted submission to certain news groups, while restricting submission to other. Direct submission would work as before. Indirect submission would transmit the article to the administrator (could be a committee, of course), who would then release the article, or return it to the submittor. Something similar has been in place for a number of years in the "COM" telecommunications system. Articles on that system have appeared in Decus symposia. A similar "submission->administrator->net" system has been used in Dec to interface local Dec users to Arpa lists such as Human-Nets and Telecom. Suggestions are welcome. Martin Minow decvax!minow
furuta (04/25/83)
I think that the approach suggested in the article "Save net.general" is a reasonable one. Instead of requiring that an administrator wade through the news which is being generated at his site (we volunteer to do this stuff, right), I would like to suggest that it be stated strongly in the news installation documents, etc., that a site administrator is asked to discourage inappropriate uses of the net--this could be through following up inappropriate articles generated by users on his system. One problem with any schemes requiring that a site appoint an administrator who has certain powers and responsibilites should be apparent from current use of the net. A certain amount of the traffic which causes complaints is generated, apparently, by people who are site administrators somewhere. I refer particularly to the posting of test messages to the wrong groups, the creation of groups which seem to offend the net as a whole (and, in particular, the newgroup, rmgroup, cancel control message battles which have raged in the past). The point here is that newsadministrators don't seem to behave noticably different from the rest of the news readers. Problems which exist now will continue to exist. The difficulty with net.general seems to be that the name "general" is, well what else can I say than "general". From time to time, we see actual news articles posted to net.news. Should it be surprising that net.general gets articles more appropriate to net.misc? What I suggest is that net.general be left unchanged and a new group be formed. The name of the group should be sufficiently scary that people won't be tempted to post miscellaneous garbage to it. I suggest, perhaps, something like net.worldwide, although that doesn't seem quite scary enough. Net.announcements is certainly too benign--I can envision people posting all sorts of irrelevant stuff to that (the Rutgers colloquium notice sounds like it might belong on this group, for instance). Add the new group to the default subscription list, put an appropriately serious sounding warning message into the system, convince Europe to take it, and see if things change. It seems far easier to add groups to this system than to rename or remove groups. This ought to be kept in mind in our deliberations. --Rick
rabin (04/30/83)
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