From: utzoo!decvax!goutal Newsgroups: net.news.b Title: Re: Lets have Usenet grow up Article-I.D.: decvax.292 Posted: Wed Sep 22 02:19:07 1982 Received: Wed Sep 22 07:08:32 1982 References: unc.3546 Ref: Article 128 About flames... Most of the flames I've seen have included a "flame on ... flame off" notice. Seems to me that a flame keyword could be among the most common. Meantime, hubbout we institute a set of xxx.flame subgroups for most groups. I think newsgroups DO work, to some extent. They are much more interactive or responsive or whatever than 'digests'. Note the quotes, by the way -- most of the so-called digests on the ARPAnet are not generally digested, and only moderately moderated. This is not to say that digests are dumb -- they're not -- they are a very useful tool. Consider the following spectrum of newsy things: 1. KEYWORD NEWS Completely arbitrary, very dynamic, topics grow and die, extremely responsive, lots of junk, requires some librarian skills to make any sense of the results 2. NEWSGROUPS (like we have now) very responsive, very junky with no way to weed out the junk -- i.e. very responsive in terms of being able to POST news, but not very resonsive to the need to select just what you want to read 3. NOTESFILES Mostly like newsgroups, except that chronology makes more sense, easier to ignore whole subdiscussions stemming from original notes 4. MODERATED NEWS This appears to be like notesfiles, except that the editing is done by a human instead of mechanically by some chronology or whatever. But the idea is that the moderator merely packages the articles so they can be read more sensibly, and can do things like strongly suggest that things are getting beyond the scope of the group. 5. DIGESTS Here I mean something other than the ARPAnet thingies -- those are closer to what I call "moderated news". The moderator of a true digest is more like a newspaper editor. It is assumed that the moderator has the power to not repost (riposte?) articles according to his or her interpretation of some previously laid-down guidelines, in the interests of making the result more compact. In particular, the moderator is responsible for collecting multiple replies to specific questions, and posting the results as a single article. Note the spread from the anarchic to the monarchic. Note also that as anarchy goes up, the user must exert more effort to get useful information out of the system. Note MOSTLY that they are ALL useful! Oh, well, food for thought. -- Kenn (decvax!)goutal