mark (06/01/82)
The current official policy on creation new newsgroups is that someone is supposed to propose it in net.general,net.news.group (substitute whatever for net if it's a local group, or set up your own procedure) and all followups are supposed to go to net.news.group only. (The followup command in all recent versions of news does this automatically.) Once a consensus is reached, the person who originally proposed it should make a yes/no decision on the newsgroup and a name, announce it to net.general, and create it. (If he is not the netnews contact at his site, he should ask that person to create it, or ask me.) Modern versions of the software do not let people create new groups unless they are the local netnews contact, or the super user. There are many old versions still in use out there that don't enforce this, which shows that no matter what change we make, getting software to enforce it in the finite future is very hard. The net.sctv business has recreated the suggestion of a netnews committee who makes all the decisions. It has not been resolved yet. The last time somebody suggested this, there was overwhelming sentiment to not restrict new newsgroups, but rather to make the software wonderful, by such things as automatically expiring empty newsgroups, and making it much faster to do readnews or checknews. (This will probably happen in version 3.0, which is right now in the wishful thinking stage due to lack of time on the part of the authors.) As to natural language, the flaming has gone on for a while but the person who proposed it hasn't made a decision. Personally, I don't understand what you guys are going to talk about, but there is lots of stuff I don't subscribe to. So I'll make a decision: net.nlang is now created with no subgroups. Post to it and mention the particular language in your title. Any language that picks up significant activity that continues after the novelty wears off (the participants should decide this) should create its own subgroup. New natural language newsgroups can be started in the parent newsgroup. (Off the wall thought - once the 14 char limit goes away in the eventual version 3.0, you might want to call it "net.tongues".) Mark
bstempleton (06/01/82)
I would just like to make one comment about the creation of groups. People seem to be of the opinion that the net should be used for every discussion that goes on! If I created a newsgroup for every group of people I hold discussions with locally here, the list would get very long. I have seen people put out a message saying 'anybody interested in net.blat', get back 3 mail messages and say 'I guess there are people interested, time to create net.blat'. CRAP! Right now the net has many many sites, and if you create a net.group, you send these messages that 4 people want to each and every one of them. The net is more economical of resources when a large discussion is taking place, but not at all whent the discussion is small. When you get ten people or less interested in the discussion, talk by mail! If you can, have the most central person set up an alias somewhere, but this is not needed, because the number of you will be small enough that you can all keep personal mailing lists. Once more people join the group, then say 'I already have a large number of people fervently discussing the Bob and Doug show. Let's have a group' People who are holding these groups should simply send messages with long expiry dates to some group like net.news.group (or perhaps a special one) describing the discussion and how to get in on it. Brad