Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!alberta!ubc-cs!van-bc!sl
From: sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Suggestion for new newsgroup creation rule.
Message-ID: <1841@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jun 88 06:05:16 GMT
References: <1779@looking.UUCP> <3187@edm.UUCP>
Reply-To: sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne)
Organization: Wimsey Associates, Vancouver, BC.
Lines: 43

In article <3187@edm.UUCP> rroot@edm.UUCP (Stephen Samuel) writes:
>From article <1779@looking.UUCP>, by brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton):
>> In article <960@ficc.UUCP> peter@ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>> I like this idea, although I don't think "alt" should be used, but rather
>> a new distribution, called "tryout" or something.
>
>Part of the problem with a 'trial' distribution is:
> 1) It's not likely to get a very strong distribution (or even
>connectivity, for that mater) which will REALLY skew results. Many
>people won't even get the Create message.
> 2) If it DOES get a good distribution, then it almost defeats the original
>reason for creating the distribution group.

I hadn't thought of the trial distribution in this manner. I assumed that
very few sites would take trial.all, but instead if a system manager saw
that trial.blimps was now available and he was interested he would ask for
that explicitly. 

So eventually a hopefully large number of sites would be receiving the new
group. At some point it would be moved from trial.blimp to rec.blimps or
perhaps alt.blimps or biz.goodyear.

This whole discussion really boils down to one of alternate backbones. Many
unix sites don't particulary care about the volume, they will take virtually
anything that you throw at them - as long as they don't have to pay for it!

For UseNet to survive more sites are going to have to start paying for
delivery of their own news and mail messages. Most likely regional nets will
play an important part in this. While many of the arpanet type sites and
educational sites will continue to get feeds and mail at low cost (or at
least embedded in part of a larger budget) many of the newer commercial or
"hobbyist" sites are going to have to organize themselves to take advantage
of low cost long distance and TrailBlazers to route their own mail around. 

I'm busy scurrying away in this part of the world setting up a mechanism for
doing this. Nothing in a great hurry but at least if we lost our major feed
(via ubc) we would have alternatives where a year ago we didn't. By this
time next year I hope to be routing a significant portion of the uucp type
mail for this area to offload it from ubc. It's going to be fun!


-- 
Stuart.Lynne@wimsey.bc.ca {ubc-cs,uunet}!van-bc!sl     Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532