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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: magic numbers
Message-ID: <745@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 14:10:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.745
Posted: Fri Aug 16 14:10:17 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 21:07:11 EDT
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 56

"... 30 is the magic number for forming a new group..."

Really?  30 seems like a good number for a mailing list to me.  There
are well over a 1000 machines on this net, with many 10's of thousands
of users.  And we think that we should start a new group because
30 people want it?  Increasing the traffic to all sites as a result?

Even worse, when you start a new group like mod.sources.pc (please, under
no circumstances should there be more unmoderated source groups!) it
is very tempting for everyone in the universe to simply post everything
they have, even stuff that has been posted in the past or is already
widely distributed.  Even moderators are hard pressed to deal properly with
things like that.

Source groups, in particular, have a very high potential for massively
increasing traffic.  I can't see any good excuse for unmoderated source
groups, since the value of the source certainly won't be hurt by
a little moderation delay.  In fact, very little of the net traffic
would be hurt by moderate moderation delay.  But whether moderated or
not, new source groups shoudn't be created at the drop of the hat--
no groups should be.

Regardless of whether groups are moderated or unmoderated,
I want to once again implore people to use mailing lists whenever
possible.  We've been seeing the creation of many new high volume
groups lately, and things are starting to gradually crack all
over the place.  Even low volume groups shouldn't be created when
existing groups can fill the need.  Remember, when new groups are
created they tend to CREATE NEW TRAFFIC -- they don't just syphon
off existing traffic.  The existence of a new group in the group
list triggers the posting of much more material--I've been
watching the stats on this and know this to be true.  It may be
primarily a psychological effect ("gee, now that we have our own
group we can feel free to post whatever we like") but the effect
is real and affects virtually every site.  

It's time again to take a more global view of the network and 
the way it's growing, before we create ourselves into a traffic
deadlock that will probably result in many (more) sites pulling
the plug on netnews entirely.  Stargate is coming along but
is limited right now by equipment availability and can't even 
consider taking any real load for sometime yet.  In the meantime, 
all we have is the current environment from which to choose our
materials.  I'd very much like to see a moratorium on the creation
of any new groups until we can work out some sort of organized
system for dealing with the short term growth.  The alternative
is plugs starting to be pulled all over the place, some by
major sites, simply as a matter of self defense.  The creation of
all groups, moderated or unmoderated, general or specific, affect
the net traffic in manners not well understood and cost amounts
of money that nobody can really imagine.  I think the time has
come to step back, take a breath, and think a little before
we try continue with "business as usual" and lead ourselves
farther down the path to trouble.

--Lauren--