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