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.