Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!woods From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Old Group Deletion Procedures Keywords: delete obsolete newsgroups Message-ID: <4492@ncar.ucar.edu> Date: 26 Sep 89 22:45:58 GMT References: <3137@ur-cc.UUCP> <1989Sep26.212755.8458@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 25 In article <1989Sep26.212755.8458@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> david@jane.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (David Robinson) writes: >Why bother deleting inactive groups? They are only taking up one inode >on your disk and one line in your active file. (This is a form letter. This question has been asked and answered so many times that it has probably set a USENET record by now, and ought to be included in the news.announce.newusers postings) 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. Secondly, naming issues are VERY important. It seems clear that we can handle a lot more newsgroups if we ensure that they are placed properly within the hierarchy and have well-chosen names. If you look at some of the recent debates over sci.skeptic and soc.rights.human (and even sci.econ vs sci.economics), you can see that this is NOT a trivial issue! 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, or you can consider the extreme case where every article is it's own newsgroup. Since this is exactly like having no newsgroups at all, it does prove that a line must be drawn SOMEWHERE, or at least that there COULD be such a thing as too many newsgroups. --Greg