[gnu.config] DISCUSSION - modification of charter for news.announce.newgroups

allbery@nc386.uucp (Brandon S. Allbery) (08/18/89)

As quoted from <4001@looking.on.ca> by brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton):
+---------------
| But I am interested in finding out what new groups get created in these
| hierarchies, so that I can decide if I want to get them fed to me.  It
| would be nice to just get announcements, with a short 5 line description for
| each gorup, and not have to check for changes in a big list of one line
| descriptions of everything.   I think that so long as it's moderated, even
| my enemies don't have to worry about it being abused by evil money grubbing
| scum such as myself.
+---------------

I emailed Greg a suggestion for an alternative solution; may as well present
it to the net at large for consideration.

Firstly, I don't think that newgroup announcements for non-"mainstream" groups
belong in a "mainstream" newsgroup.  I think this because any such messages
should be distributed such that they are also visible in the non-mainstream
hierarchy; and, while I don't know of any such sites, it's quite possible for
someone to get an alt-only newsfeed, etc.

Which leads to my suggestion: a "meta-hierarchy".  (Call it "meta" just for
the purposes of discussion.)  This hierarchy would be considered to be a part
of *all* news hierarchies, whether world, alt, gnu, biz, etc.  It would be
restricted to newsgroups and discussions concerning hierarchies, interaction
between them, and maintenance of multiple-hierarchy systems (ncoast, for
example, is a backbone for "alt" and also carries unix-pc, u3b, and pubnet,
with gnu coming as soon as the 386 (currently "nc386", we FINALLY got all the
problems worked out and our feeds are being moved even as I write this) is
settled).  A newsgroup for announcement of new newsgroups on any hierarchy
would make sense in such a meta-hierarchy.  Please note that I do *not* expect
this hierarchy to make policy for any other hierarchy; but it would be a good
place to discuss the real-world implementation of such policies across
hierarchies -- say, cross-posting between biz and world.  (Note that I'm using
"world" to represent the mainstream Usenet, that being the most inclusive
distribution for the mainstream.)

Initially, only a few groups would be necessary (or desirable!), but there is
room for expansion if/when it's needed/wanted.  My thoughts on the initial
configuration is to have meta.newgroups and meta.admin, with meta.admin as the
primary newsgroup until/unless there is sufficient traffic to split it up.

Comments, anyone?  (Oh, if I missed any hierarchies in the Newsgroups: line or
got the wrong newsgroup for some of them, please feel free to repost this to
them -- obviously, what I'm proposing will affect all news hierarchies, so
everyone ought to have some input into it.)

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery@NCoast.ORG
uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery		    ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu
"Why do trans-atlantic transfers take so long?"
"Electrons don't swim very fast."  -john@minster.york.ac.uk and whh@PacBell.COM