From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Title: Re: on the fate of the newsgroup class net.all
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.742
Posted: Wed Mar 23 20:49:42 1983
Received: Fri Mar 25 00:21:33 1983
References: cbosgd.3325

Instead of making all these different news groups, what happened to the
proposal to tag each article with a "group" and a "distribution"?  That
makes much more sense to me.  Then, instead of having groups sf-lovers,
nj.sf-lovers, usa.sf-lovers, na.sf-lovers, and world.sf-lovers (just to
pick a random example), you would have a single group sf-lovers, with
differing distributions ("local", "nj", "usa", "na", and "world").  All
the news in the group would be presented together, and you wouldn't
have to remember if the group "nj.sf-lovers" (for example) were already
created (assuming that "sf-lovers" exists) when attempting to post a
message.  Specifying what to forward to another site might get a little
more complex, but how often do you edit the sys file as opposed to how
often you read or post news?  Also, you would like to be able to say in
your .newsrc that you, for example, only want local news on that
machine.  If we're going to upheave everything, we should seriously
consider the merits of the current scheme vs all other contenders.

(Note that this is easy to map to and from the current scheme at
gateways to old news programs.)

=Spencer