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From: sob@academ.UUCP (Stan Barber)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc,news.groups,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: The Requested Presentation of Quota Based News Control
Message-ID: <156@academ.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 03:36:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: academ.156
Posted: Fri Jul 10 03:36:13 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 18:01:38 EDT
References: <266@brandx.rutgers.edu> <8225@utzoo.UUCP> <272@brandx.rutgers.edu> <153@tmsoft.UUCP> <285@klinzhai.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: sob@academ.UUCP (Stan Barber)
Organization: ACADEM Computer Systems, Houston, Tx
Lines: 98
Xref: mnetor news.admin:691 news.misc:752 news.groups:1231 news.sysadmin:304

First, I thank Bob for rehashing this. It makes much more sense than
the scatter of ideas I had previously read. Here are my thoughts.

In article <285@klinzhai.rutgers.edu> webber@klinzhai.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes:
>Currently those people who are choosing to receive only a subset of the net 
>are doing so based on group name.  This means that site administrators must
>take responsibility for decisions such as whether or not it is a proper
>utilization of their resources to carry a group whose discussion topic is
>a computer that they don't and never plan to own or a hobby such a 
>birdwatching, or job offerings from competitors, or the pros and cons of
>abortion, or the philosophical aspects of the sciences.  If one attempted
>to justify the groups one was transmitting on the basis of their content,
>I doubt if there would be more than 4 groups that could manage country wide
>distribution.  However, there is another aspect to these groups beside their
>content and that is the morale of the participants in the various discussion
>groups.  From a morale point of view, each of the groups is justified (and
>many more groups as well).

This seems to imply that you'd rather see messages restricted is some
arbitrary manner rather than a subjective one. I suspose this gets back
to your perception of the "old days" of usenet when people were able
to handle ALL the messages regardless of their perceived "worth". Your
approach also removes the need for moderatation since an arbitrary 
method would be used to retrict flow (a quota of messages or bytes or
whatever). I submit that a similiar method is in fact in use at some
low-capacity sites today. You alluded to this fact in other parts of 
this article relating to disk usage and some one-time limitation of UUCP.
It is my understanding that the whole rational behind the move toward 
moderatation is to provide a qualatative method of limiting traffic versus a
quantitative one such as yours. In theory, BOTH could exist and all sites
could use either method (or both). After all each site should be free to
manage its resources as it sees fit. The cooperative nature of usenet
allows the community to benefit, but the community should not place
restrictions on the individual sites.

The BAD thing about both systems is that some infromation is LOST.
In the quantative system, the "value" of the lost information cannot
be measured. In the qualatative system, the "value" is the main consideration.
As you are well aware, I am an advocate of the qualatative system.


>Thus, I do not see any problem being generated from the use of quotas
>to manage net news due to occasional loss of messages.  Indeed, I
>see it as actually encouraging a more responsible usage of the media
>in conjunction with making joining news less of a problem for individual
>site managers.  Neither do I see quotas as causing any implementation
>problems.  I await enlightenment.

I would like to believe that all readers and posters would come to value 
usenet in such a way that they use it responsibly. I think that many people
do, but some do not. I somehow doubt those people would come to value
usenet more if they knew about quotas, but I would love to be proved 
wrong. Those that use the net responsibly already operate under a 
self-imposed quota and would probably never be affected by a quota
system if one were created. The end result would probably be 
a group of "quota-busters" similar to your proposal to bypass
the moderation system.


>I believe I have adequately addressed all the issues that have formed
>a basis for objection in the past as summarized above.  I have been
>addressing this issue off and on since February and over that time
>my understanding of the problems of implementing a quota based system
>system within the structure of Usenet has grown.  In the past I have
>stressed the notion that the net would adapt to the bandwidth it found
>by reducing the number of postings and that this would occur by having
>quotas push further and further back into the system until individual
>sites were rationing the postings from their own users.  It now strikes
>me that there would be little motivation for this since once the quotas
>are in place, the pressure for changing the Usenet setup will be decentralized
>and take a wholely unpredictable course (although I have not yet extrapolated
>a future that would be worse than the currently expected one of increasing
>use of moderated groups and group-name based all or nothing flow decisions).
>
>----- BOB (webber@aramis.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!webber)

The future is what you make it, so if you think the current system is bad,
you need to come up with the new one. If you can't simulate it and 
make quantitative comparisions, you aren't going to win support to
your cause. As many people have said, usenet has no central authority
to speak of, so you can make noises about how bad it is and propose
a solution (as you have), but without a demostration, it will hold
little influence on the network as a whole.

People may not like the current system, but just complaining is not
an answer. The most helpful thing they can do is make suggestions for 
SPECIFIC changes _AND_ generate the programming necessary to make this
happen. You can see this in many examples: Larry Wall's rn, the nntp package,
C news, and so on. So, BOB, I encourage you to put your suggestions into a 
working configuration and let folks see it in action. 




-- 
Stan	     uucp:{killer,rice,hoptoad}!academ!sob     Opinions expressed here
Olan         domain:sob@tmc.edu                            are ONLY mine &
Barber       CIS:71565,623   BBS:(713)790-9004               noone else's.