barrett@Daisy.EE.UND.AC.ZA (Alan P Barrett) (06/02/91)
[Followup-To: news.admin] In article <1991Jun01.041929.8253@looking.on.ca>, brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > [...] on my own machine, I am fed exactly the set of current groups > being read on my own site and downstream sites, and this is done > without human intervention. This is what I belive the long term > solution to be. However, until everybody uses a dynamic feeding > scheme of some sort, [...] I don't doubt that dynamic feeding would be useful to many people. But is it really the answer for everybody? It seems to me that, except near the periphery of the net, the term 'downstream' has no real meaning, and this implies that dynamic feeding is not useful except near the periphery of the net. People sometimes want to search through all the articles in all the newsgroups, looking for interesting information. Dynamic feeding introduces undesirable time delays between a user's decision to subscribe to a group and the appearance of any articles in the group. This could be especially irksome for users who read about interesting articles in other groups and want to check them out: instead of just jumping to that group and reading the article, the user has to subscribe to the group, wait for articles to arrive, and later unsubscribe from the group; if the subscription request has to go through several levels of feed sites before it gets to one that already has that group, the delay could be so long that the desired article has already expired fromm that feed site, and will therefore not be seen by the user who wanted it. --apb Alan Barrett, Dept. of Electronic Eng., Univ. of Natal, Durban, South Africa RFC822: barrett@ee.und.ac.za Bang: m2xenix!quagga!undeed!barrett