woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (09/27/89)
We have had a long discussion about the voting procedure. While there was no general agreement on a lot of things, one thing is pretty clear: NOBODY came out and said that we really needed the full 30 days to run a vote. Therefore the group creation guidelines have been changed to recommend 21 days as the length of the voting period. Votes ALREADY IN PROGRESS should continue to run for their originally-announced 30-day period. This change is only intended to affect calls for votes issued AFTER the posting of this announcement. Hopefully Gene's next periodic posting of the guidelines and changes to the guidelines will reflect this change. Let's bear in mind, folks, that it will take some time for everyone to become aware of the change. The 30-day limit has been in effect for a long time now (long before I formalized the guidelines a few months ago). What this means is, let's not be too quick to flame someone who announces that a vote will run for 30 days. If they really want to waste the 9 days, let them. A second change is: I have noticed a drastic increase in the number of articles submitted first to news.groups and then submitted to this group. Starting now, I will no longer accept articles for this group which have already been posted to news.groups . The reason for this change is NOT to try and force people to use this group, but rather to conserve net bandwidth. I respond fairly quickly to submissions; if you want to cross-post to news.groups too, that's fine, I will gladly submit the article to any groups you indicate in your Newsgroups: header when I post it to this group, including news.groups. If you are running properly-configured news software, all you need to is cross-post just as you normally would. The only limitation is that you shouldn't cross-post to any OTHER moderated groups. The idea behind this new rule is to prevent two separate copies of articles from being sent all over the net. Especially when it is completely unnecessary to do so. Submitting it to this group delays it only a few hours. No new newsgroup proposal is so important that it cannot wait a few hours. To try and stave off a FEW flames, it is true that the guidelines say that articles must appear in this group. However, in practice a number of discussions and votes have been held where the calls for discussion and/or votes have appeared only in news.groups . Personally, I think people should WANT to use this group because it is likely to be read by more people, and since it has fewer articles in it, an article appearing here is more likely to be noticed. However, it seems that in practice the net is willing to accept calls for discussion and votes that appear in news.groups rather than here. I have no problem with that. I *do* have a problem with wasting bandwidth just to save a small amount of time. --Greg