lauren (03/24/83)
My gut feeling is that trying to create a distinction between USA news and WORLD news would probably be pretty useless. Enough people would be certain that THEIR message was just SO interesting that EVERYBODY would want to read it -- and so most messages that now go into net.general (for example) would go to world.general (or whatever) instead. You just cannot depend on everybody to take the time required to fully "think out" where a message should *really* go. Just an opinion. --Lauren-- I should add that moderators might help here -- a function of a moderator might be to help determine which messages fell into various geographic delivery catagories. We've been over the moderator issue before, of course. --LW--
gnu (03/25/83)
I don't see that "world.all" is any more global than "net.all". All of the net is all of the world if the net covers the world, right? So I take your proposal to really mean "let's start some newsgroups that are restricted to just the USA". Lauren pointed out one problem with that. Another is that I don't have any idea what the Europeans want to read. This won't make me a very good judge of where to post. Is there any point in a "net.micro" and a "usa.micro"? We're all using the same micros, I think, but I could be wrong. I guess the point is that sites receiving mail over expensive links must do their own editing. We in the rest of the net don't know enough about their needs and wants to be able to classify our messages for them -- if indeed we (as a group) would take the time to do so. John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems PS: Would a digital carrier like Telenet or Tymnet be cheaper for crossing the ocean? Maybe there's a net site on Telenet (UDel-Relay?) which will accept collect Telenet connections from an overseas backbone site.
furuta (03/26/83)
It seems like a bad idea to rename net.all. My reasons for thinking this are: - while there are many topics which are geographically limited, there are equally as many which are not. Of course things like "apartment for rent" notices are most appropriately sent to geographically limited groups. On the other hand, disscussions like net.physics, while not of interest to the entire net, are not limited in interest to a geographical area, either. Dividing the net up into geographic areas seems parochial. - Inappropriate material will continue to be posted. In many cases, people just don't have the fascination with the net necessary to choose the proper subgroup. In other cases, people new to the net often make gaffes. The messages which started this discussion seemed to have been posted by a news administrator on a new site who was testing thing out. - It is extremely difficult to get people to change their habits. Changing net.all to something else would be an administrative nightmare. We still get occasional rmgroup messages for net.trivia, after all. In light of this, I think it appropriate to look at the problem again. The problem is that it costs too much to send stuff to Europe to justify sending junk messages (although, I suppose one could alternately argue that such junk messages are just part of the price one pays for connection to this net--the yearly costs of which to each node are extraordinarily small when compared to Arpanet costs). vortex!lauren notes the idea of using moderators but then rejects it because of past reaction from the net. I agree with those who think that moderating newsgroups is a bad idea in general. However, I think that this could be the solution to this problem. I am not, however, talking about net wide moderating. News from the US to Europe passes through a single site, if I read the news maps correctly. What I propose is that moderating be provided for this link and this link only. Rather than directly feeding incoming news to the outgoing queue, divert it to one or a number of moderators. News which was approved by the moderator would then be placed into the queue. Hopefully, the European sites would be willing to pay moderators something from the money saved in phone charges. Alternately, one would hope that a company with sites in both the United States and Europe would be willing to provide this service. The thing I like about this idea is that it is easy to implement and affects only the sites which have the problem, not the net as a whole. --Rick