Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnewsh!wcs From: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: New Newsgroup Queries Message-ID: <4173@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> Date: 25 Sep 89 03:13:46 GMT References: <586@wet.UUCP> Reply-To: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) Distribution: na Organization: Your typical phone company involved in your typical daydream Lines: 36 In article <586@wet.UUCP> epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) writes: ]The only time you want to answer "n" is when the newsgroup is obviously bogus ](which shouldn't happen if your news administrator is even semi-competent). IMHO, I was a rather competent news administrator (my machine has since retired), but bogus newsgroups would get created there anyway. Why? Because I ran one of the few systems in the known universe that didn't use the MANUALLY option - my machine would accept any newgroup and rmgroup requests that came across the network, because I considered it to be better policy to accept incoming control messages than to have to do it all by hand. Part of my motivation was the Great Newsgroup Renaming, part of it was a heavy travel schedule, and part of it was admittedly to avoid reading all the mail about how alt.weemba.stupid had been created and destroyed six times that day. But part of it was a hold-over to the early days when netnews was a cooperative venture, where anybody could create a newsgroup when they wanted to, and things worked ok. Netnews works because people are willing to work together, and people are willing to tolerate occasional silly behavior from other people without turning into flame wars. A little patience and constructive cooperation from both users and administrators goes a long way toward keeping the net working well. When news volume reached 1 Megabyte/day, a lot of people started predicting the Immanent Death of USENET. But it's still here, because of a lot of hard work from a lot of people, both administrators like Gene Spafford and Rick Adams and software-writers like Larry Wall (author of rn). Who knows? Maybe you could be next! Bill -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs # also found at 201-271-4712 tarpon.att.com!wcs Somerset 4C423 Corp. Park 3 # More Colombians die from American tobacco than Americans from Colombian coke.