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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watcgl!onfcanim!dave
From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: Re: Fear and Loathing on the Clouds
Message-ID: <14720@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Oct-85 12:51:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: onfcanim.14720
Posted: Fri Oct 25 12:51:49 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Oct-85 06:20:34 EDT
References: <614@h-sc1.UUCP> <1817@hao.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Distribution: net
Organization: ONF, Montreal
Lines: 65
Xref: watmath net.news:4152 net.news.group:3992

To me, something seems slightly odd about the "sufficient traffic in other
groups" criterion for creation of a new newsgroup.

An example is "net.digital".  Every once in a while someone proposes starting
this group, and it usually ends up vetoed because of the argument that there
is little if any current traffic that should go in such a group.

Yet, does anyone dispute that there would be some traffic if the group
existed?  Not a large amount, and not likely the "ongoing discussion"
that seems necessary to generate enough traffic to start up a group.
But the group *would* be useful if created - how else to get in touch
with other people with skills and interests in that area?  (Surely you
don't seriously suggest that people read net.misc looking for technical
articles?)  I'm sure there are even better examples of groups that
could have a useful role in USENET, even if their traffic averaged over
time was quite small.

I remember when I started reading USENET (1981) that creation of a new
group required little more than a group of people who were interested in
discussing a particular subject.  I *liked* that.  Of course, few people
were worried about bandwidth then.  If I recall correctly, when the
"rules" about requiring a concensus, and existing traffic, were first
introduced, it was due to concern about software that could handle no
more than a certain arbitrary number of total newsgroups, not for reasons
of discouraging traffic.

Now, the reasoning given for enforcing the current creation rules is
one of limiting backbone traffic.  But is this a group that the backbone
sites would mind carrying?  Its content would likely be largely technical;
it would likely be of assistance to a number of people on the net in
carrying out their jobs.  Contrast this with net.flame, or net.abortion,
or net.origins, which were created because of overwhelming discussion
volumes in other groups, yet I cannot imagine anyone arguing that they
are "useful" in the same sense as a net.digital (or net.internat) would
be.

What I would like to see is pruning of current high-volume low-content
groups as utzoo has recently done, in order to retain enough bandwidth
so that the creation of "useful" groups can be *encouraged*, rather than
discouraged.

Of course this requires people to make subjective judgements of what is
"useful", and thus open themselves to charges of unfairness.  Thus a
scheme based on entirely objective measures such as "sufficient traffic"
is appealing for its apparent fairness.

But I will happily trade the freedom to post an argument to net.flame or
net.abortion for the freedom to *create new groups* on potentially-interesting
topics.  And on a net whose content seems to be restricted by backbone
bandwidth, it seems that you can't have both "freedoms" at once.

Now, the people ultimately responsible for restricting bandwidth are the
site administrators.  I'm very interested in their comments on this.
Do you think that enforced stagnation of newsgroups (restricting new groups)
is a good solution to increasing traffic?  Any other comments?

I don't wish to propose how to alter the current "rules" on newsgroup
creation and forwarding.  I just want to engender some discussion of
where we want USENET to head in the future.

	Dave Martindale

P.S.  I have been a news administrator on various machines for the past
four years, and have both a personal and "professional" interest in what
happens to USENET.