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From: mjl@ritcv.UUCP (Mike Lutz)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Against the fall of net.internat
Message-ID: <8973@ritcv.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 26-Oct-85 13:12:16 EST
Article-I.D.: ritcv.8973
Posted: Sat Oct 26 13:12:16 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 29-Oct-85 01:17:38 EST
References: <1149@sdcsvax.UUCP> <1818@hao.UUCP>
Reply-To: mjl@ritcv.UUCP (Michael Lutz)
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
Lines: 46

In article <1818@hao.UUCP> woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods) writes:
>
>... Worthiness of the topic
>is not mentioned ANYWHERE; the sole criteria for justifying a group is
>DEMONSTRATED NEED based on volume of postings in related groups.

Not to pick on Greg, because this sentiment seems to be that of Spaf
and some other admins, but this rule can be used to show that net.bizarre
should be a newsgroup and net.internat should not.  I'm certain all the
'bizarrenix' can rapidly deluge other groups and vote thousands
of times in net.news for their pet group.  Since worthiness is not
a criterion, they should be allowed to recreate net.bizarre because
they've demonstrated a need and we all know they can generate the
volume.  It's 99 and 44/100% trash, though, and I don't want to
have to carry it.

Net.internat, on the other hand, has a much smaller community of writers
and readers.  I know, I know, there was a lot of repitition in the first
few postings, but at least some *worthy* issues were addressed, and the
signal to noise ratio is *much* higher than net.bizarre.  I don't see
how these folks could ever justify a newsgroup based on volume, but they
obviously have a unifying theme, and I think the worthiness and general
high content justify the group.

By the way, newsgroup creation wasn't always so rigidly constrained.
I know; I was in on the creation of both net.bicycle and net.garden,
two newsgroups that will never hit the top 25 (thank God) but which
are nicely meeting the needs of well-defined and widely dispersed
groups of users.

Were I to propose rules, I'd want to see more emphasis put on the theme
of the group (so you could tell what it's about), with some reasonable
show of netwide interest.  This, of course, does not address the *real*
problem of the volume of trash, with bad articles driving out good in
variant of Gresham's Law.  But then the current rules do not adequately
address this problem either.  In fact, I believe that "trash
compaction" is the real reason behind the removal of net.bizarre (a
move I support), but it had to be justified in terms of our rules, and
net.internat was an innocent victim of the purge.  So let's concentrate
on mechanisms to eliminate trash and less on developing newsgroup
creation rules with constraints that would test the wisdom of Solomon
and the patience of Job.
-- 
Mike Lutz	Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY
UUCP:		{allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!mjl
CSNET:		mjl%rit@csnet-relay.ARPA