Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Old Group Deletion Procedures Keywords: delete obsolete newsgroups Message-ID: <22888@looking.on.ca> Date: 27 Sep 89 18:43:25 GMT References: <3137@ur-cc.UUCP> <1989Sep26.212755.8458@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> <4492@ncar.ucar.edu> Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 64 Class: discussion In article <4492@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes: > The problem with creating extraneous newsgroups is not a network resource >issue, it is a HUMAN resource issue. The more newsgroups there are, the >harder it is to find the right group to post in. >.... > If you don't believe that too many newsgroups is a problem, you can either >look at the number of articles ALREADY posted to the wrong group because >the poster couldn't find the right group ... This answer has been given so many times too, but is it a feeling or are there some fact behind it. How hard is it today to find the right group to post in? Is it harder today than it was before? I will admit that "alt" confuses things a bit, but other than that, how many people feel it's harder? I do not think that we get more articles posted to the wrong group nowadays. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are less. Particularly if you consider that most accusations of posting to the "wrong" group come in cases like talk.abortion/soc.women where a group has been created to explicitly divert traffic, and people don't know about it. But before net.abortion was created, the strong feeling was that all abortion postings in soc.women were in the "wrong" group because the topic had been done to death there, just as was recently the case for rape. So how about it? It is harder to pick a group today? Are there more mistakes today? My PN program (free to any who want it) helps a little. When you run it with no args, you see something like this: (It draws the menu from the newsgroups file.) -------------------------- Select a newsgroup for your posting by entering menu selections. A "+" after a selection indicates subchoices are available. Type "?" for information on a particular newsgroup. 1) alt + The Alternative Net Hierarchy. 2) biz + Commercial Newsgroups 3) general Articles that should be read by everyone on your local system. 4) test A place to test postnews or inews. 5) comp + Computation-related newsgroups. 6) misc + Miscellaneous newsgroups, not fitting other categories. 7) news + Newsgroups about News. 8) rec + Newsgroups of a primarily recreational nature. 9) sci + Newsgroups containing scientific contents. 10) soc + Social issue newsgroups. 11) talk + Discussion newsgroups. 12) junk 13) Abort Abort the posting process. 14) Type Group Name Type the name of the desired newsgroup(s). Selection: ----------------------------- (Then in prompts for the subject, edits the article, and performs checks on it and pops up menus for general and group-specific classifications. If the group specific file for soc.women wants to, it can search for the word abortion in the posting and suggest the newsgroups line be modified.) -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473