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From: faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: <4414@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 11 Jul 88 21:31:00 GMT
References: <1830@looking.UUCP>  <4277@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> 
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Lines: 28

It seems like NNTP has had two effects -- it has made news cheaper,
because it's more effecient and it makes it easier for news to go over
the internet, but on the other hand it's made news a lot quicker, thus
increasing volume.  The first is good, obviously, but the second is
bad.  I've posted things, seen followups from the East Coast, posted
followups to them, and seen more followups to my followups all in one
night.  While this may make discussions a lot easier, they're very bad
for volume.

Since we don't have the old bandwidth constraints (uucp batching, etc),
I think we should create some new ones.  How about adding a
re-transmission delay into the news software, so that an article would
wait at a particular site for at least a few hours (say) before being
sent out again?  That way, the high-bandwidth newsgroups would have
discussions with delays of a few days or so, instead of an hour or
two.  We could set different delays for different newsgroups, so that
cancel messages and "timely" groups like comp.risks and *.announce
would move quickly, whereas soc.singles and comp.lang.c could move more
slowly.  For binary and source groups it wouldn't make much of a
difference, since they don't contain followups.

The problem with this is that discussions would arrive at people at
widely different times, and there would be a lot more followups about
things that for most people are weeks old.

Does this sound sensible?

	Wayne