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