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