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