From: utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Title: Re: Lets have Usenet grow up
Article-I.D.: watmath.2613
Posted: Sun Jun 13 22:31:24 1982
Received: Mon Jun 14 04:17:40 1982
References: houxm.197

I certainly agree that the USENET software has to change quite a bit too,
but here's what I see as good ideas:

1) Abandon the 'newsgroup' concept.  Let people post and allow them to
put keywords in the article rather than a newsgroup name.  Keep a database
of known keywords that people are using, and let the users see it.  Along
with the keyword, keep things like usage counts and last usage dates, to see
if things are dead.  Use the Notesfile system of associating initiation messages
and replies together so you see them all at once or quickly skip a whole
session.  Right now there are too many topics of interest and it is a real pain
to have discussion on should we have a group called xxx or what should the
name be.  Let the computer worry.
	When a new keyword is introduced, not found in the database, add it.
Post a message with the keyword 'new_keyword' associated with it, and
since most people will put this keyword in their interest list, they will see
what is going on.

2) Keep distribution seperate from keywords.  For example, I might give
keywords "movie", "star trek" for a review of the new Star Trek flick, and
I might want to specify a distribution of "net", "ontario", "waterloo" or
"local" as I please.  Right now we have the newsgroup names and their
distributions all mixed up together.  They don't belong that way.

3) Naturally, allow fancy (regular expression) pattern matching on the keywords.
this way if somebody uses 'suicides' instead of 'suicide', the intelligently
set keyword of "suicide.*" will catch them all.

4) In the future allow for automatic distribution of messages to subsets of
the net.  I might be interested in "Ikonas" frame buffers, and I might
want to send messages of "net" wide distribution, but I suspect that a lot
of sites won't want it.  Allow the setup of an automatic subscriber system.
I see the keyword 'Ikonas' is active but I note my site doesn't get it.
I send a 'subscribe' message out on the net until I find a site that does
get it, and that site then forwards to mine.   Automatic subnets with
minimal overhead.

5) Perhaps allow moderators in some way.  As usenet grows, many sites will
not be able to afford the DDD/machine/modem costs to support the whole net.
They will only want a portion.  Simple designations like net. and pers.
will not be enough - they may insist on getting only moderated stuff, so
that junk is weeded out.  Allow simple implementation of this.

6) Use data compresssion to reduce phone costs on machines where cpu is
cheap.  (You can do this now, using 'compact' and 'ccat' as filters for
your news items if you have bsd.  They provide reasonable compression at
the cost of CPU, but if you run at night, that is not too bad.  It means
saving a BUNDLE in long distance)
Have huffman compression that knows a dictionary of the 1000 most common
usenet words (garnered from /usr/spool/news say) and also knows how to
compress common site names, keywords and header descriptors.  SAVE MONEY
and keep the usenet alive longer

These are not Pipe dreams.  They are something for 'C' news perhaps.
I hope they come eventually, if somebody has the time to code them.