wcs) (02/06/90)
> How do I set up a newsgroup called rec.auto.stock ? or rec.auto.restoration ?
The official how-to-create-a-newsgroup guidelines get periodically
posted to news.groups and similar places, and there's now a group
called news.announce.newgroups as well. Look in groups like that
for the guidelines; also news.admin.
Essentially it works like this:
1) you read the guidelines!!!
2) you post a call for discussion in news.announce.newgroups
3) the discussion takes place in news.groups for a while
4) when you've had enough discussion (there are guidelines
for how much is enough), you announce an upcoming vote
in news.announce.newgroups and news.groups.
5) a little while later, voting begins, lasts for a while, and ends.
6) you announce the results. If there were enough votes
(the rules change, but it's typically 100 more YES than NO)
it wins, and you wait for some friendly system
administrator to do a newgroup message.
These procedures have been worked out over a few years. A long time
ago, if you wanted to create a newsgroup, you just did it.
But as the net got bigger, this turned into Chaos, and a bunch of
the people who kept the major systems on the net going put some
formalism into the process (even an anarchy can have order develop,
especially when things really do depend on cooperation to work well.)
News.announce.newgroups got created when the traffic on news.groups
became too large for most people to read it regularly.
On the alt.net, things are officially still an anarchy - you carry
newsgroups if and only if you want to, and anybody who knows how
can create a newsgroup. But not everyone will carry it;
you still should be nice and announce the group in alt.config and
news.groups and discuss it for a little while before creating it.
Anarchies run on respect and cooperation; (If you want to create a
newsgroup alt.<whoever>.stupid, you'll just annoy people. Anyway,
it's been done before.)
In your case, where the discussion is a reasonable subset of the
rec.autos discussions, you probably should try to do it in rec.*
instead of creating alt.auto-restore and later moving it; this tends
to be a hassle. By the way, I wouldn't recommend calling it
alt.auto.restore, because this implies creating a new hierarchy
alt.auto, which may not work out everywhere.
So go read the procedures, and start a discussion to see if a
newsgroup will really generate on-going discussion - sounds like it might.
Then decide whether you're patient enough to wait the 1-3 months ti
usually takes to do a discussion-and-voting process or whether you
want to announce an alt.group and create it a week later instead.
Good luck. Bill
--
# Bill Stewart AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs
# ho95c has gone the way of all VAX/785s, so I'm now on erebus.att.com