woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (11/18/89)
I am considering incorporating the 2/3 majority rule into the newsgroup creation guidelines in an attempt to prevent any more debacles like sci.aquaria. The intent of the 2/3 rule is not to block the creation of groups, but to use the THREAT of blocking creation to force group champions to consider naming issues seriously. It is based on the assumption (which I believe to be correct) that few people bother to vote NO on a group because they are not interested in the topic, and that most NO votes are generated over naming issues. The results of recent votes, which show that sci.aquaria is the only group which passed the 100 vote rule which would have been defeated had the 2/3 rule been in place, tend to support this assumption. I am taking a survey, since I don't want to change the guidelines unless I can demonstrate support from the net. This is not a binding vote, it's just an attempt to guage net opinion. Please MAIL me your opinion: should the newsgroup creation guidelines be changed to require not only the 100 more YES than NO, but also at least 2/3 YES votes to create a group? If you believe so, vote YES. If you do NOT like the 2/3 rule, vote NO. I don't intend to acknowledge individual votes, but I'll post the voter names after a couple of weeks. Please bear in mind that if your news software is configured to reply to the Path: header instead of From: or Reply-To: , then your vote will end up in /dev/null (literally). If you are unsure, I recommend that you mail your vote to woods@ncar.ucar.edu explicitly rather than replying to this article. --Greg