From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:glickman
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: Selection of Articles
Article-I.D.: ucbarpa.1601
Posted: Tue Jun 15 16:12:11 1982
Received: Thu Jun 17 04:30:15 1982

Hmmmm.  Let's talk about this keyword/newsgroup issue.  I see three
different ways to classify and select articles:  by keywords, by
newsgroups, and by followups.

As long as multiple newsgroups are allowed, keywords and newsgroups
are practically the same thing.  The similarity is more apparent in
A news when articles are presented in order of receipt, rather than
B's halfway-arbitrary newsgroup order.  In A news, the newsgroups
aren't as physical:  They're just keywords by which you can specify
which articles news should show you.  Newsgroups in B news are more
rigid.  They're different than keywords in that it is (or is on it's
way to being) more difficult to create new newsgroups.

Selection by followups is what notesfiles does:  An article and all
its followups are grouped together.  This makes a lot of sense and
is definitely desirable.  In my understanding, notesfiles has a two
level classification system.  The top level is notesfiles, which are
comparable to newsgroups.  Below that, articles are grouped with their
followups.  This is a better system than netnews, but I tentatively
suggest one modification:  Each notesfile can contain another notesfile
much like newsgroups.  I belive this would make it easier to handle the
large volume of articles on the net, but this may not be necessary.

bstempleton proposed dividing up the distribution and the content
parts of the newsgroup name.  That sounds good to me, except it's
not really cut and dry.  The net part of a newsgroup name isn't just
a distribution keyword, it says something about the content.  In the
same way, the second part of the name doesn't just describe content,
it may also determine the distribution of the article.  For example,
net.general probably goes to more sites than net.rec.  By convention,
it IS true that the first part of the newsgroup name is the single
most important part in the determination of an article's distribution
and I can see logically dividing the first part from the rest, it's
just important to recognize that the problem isn't entirely simple.

I believe these are some of the most important issues for C news/notesfiles
and merit some discussion.

	Matt