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
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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

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