Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!husc6!cfa!cfa250!donna From: donna@cfa250.harvard.edu (Donna Irwin x57134) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: News.announce.newuser seems to be empty Message-ID: <1070@cfa214.cfa250.harvard.edu> Date: 19 Aug 88 21:30:04 GMT References: <20421@watmath.waterloo.edu> Organization: Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Lines: 37 From article <20421@watmath.waterloo.edu>, by gamiddleton@watmath.waterloo.edu (Guy Middleton): > Saying "Usenet is at fault" is meaningless I'm posting a follow-up to deal with the large number of response my initial posting has drawn. The comments I got from other bewildered novices -- one is her site's system administrator, indicate that my confusion is far from unique. I think Usenet is interesting and I recognize that member sites don't want to make any major, expensive modifications. However, I'm certain a slight modification could be made which would help novice users without irritating veterans. For example: at the top of the ? help directory, why not include instructions for requesting that the news.announce.newusers moderators re-post .newusers info? That would be a lot more productive than telling people they're idiots for not being able to find what isn't there. After I posted, the moderator of news.announce.newusers kindly re-posted the .newusers info. Until then, I knew only what little I could piece together from news.admin and other newsgroups. I did not know that Usenet had no central administration. I did not know that Usenet cost its sites anything more than the basic overhead of owning computers and paying for phone lines. I did not know how to mail a message to someone to get him/her to re-post the .newusers info. I think blaming system administrators for failure to train users is almost as silly as blaming this nebulous entity of Usenet itself. At many large systems, the system administrator may be someone totally unknown to the novice user. Allison, using Donna's terminal