Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uwm.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: <4499@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 27 Sep 89 20:23:23 GMT
References: <3137@ur-cc.UUCP> <1989Sep26.212755.8458@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> <4492@ncar.ucar.edu> <22888@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 27

In article <22888@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>In article <4492@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>>  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 ...
>
>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.

  IF that is true, it is true because we have put some controls on
the number of new newsgroups and tried to make sure they were named
properly! Can you imagine what it would be like had there not been
a great renaming and every group were named net.something? Or if we had
let every new newsgroup proposal be implemented without a debate? How many 
articles do you think we would see in the wrong groups THEN?
  We have to make the relevant comparison. The comparison Brad is making
between the present and the past isn't the issue. The issue is the comparison
between the present and the hypothetical future, since the original question
is "what harm is there in creating unused newsgroups". 
   Referring to Chuq's recent thread of debating methods on USENET, one reason
that group creations lead to flame wars is that we are arguing about the
possible future, and as such we don't have any "facts", just speculations.
The relevant question here is "would we see more postings to inappropriate
groups if we allowed unused newsgroups to be created than we would if
we relaxed controls on new newsgroup creations?"

--Greg