Xref: utzoo news.groups:13316 news.admin:7230 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: Re: Why not just eliminate all the hierarchies? Message-ID: <1499@intercon.com> Date: 17 Oct 89 03:53:20 GMT References: <34075@looking.on.ca> <817@pmafire.UUCP> Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 40 In article <817@pmafire.UUCP>, geoff@pmafire.UUCP (Geoff Allen) writes: [ About Brad's suggestion of using a .newsrc-like sys file ] > Interesting... > > I think this idea's worthy of consideration. Just how tough would > something like this be to do? Well, the news batching module would have to be rewritten, but that's all I can think of off hand (warning: I'm only an amatuer news guru :-)). It is pretty much a logical step in the direction news has been evolving over the past n years. First, it was all or nothing. Then hierarchies and distributions appeared (with alt showing up soon after as a revival of "the good old days."). Next come things like Brad's "newsclip" language and similar ideas. The common thread is that by making the granularity of a newsfeed finer, you can reduce the amount of time you spend getting news you're just going to throw away. This is of limited usefulness to sites like UUNET, Apple, or OSU (which basically don't throw anything away if they can help it :-)), or other sites with large downstream feeds, but for the growing number of small leaf sites (or close to leaf sites), it could be a big win. I know it would be for us, for example. The machine "intercon.com" has a whole (brace yourself) four people reading news. I try and keep track of things that we want and don't want, but it would be very handy to have the feed from uunet adjust itself depending on what's in our four respective .newsrc files, without me getting mail like "can we get rec.birds?" or "can we stop getting comp.sources.amiga?". Now, I admit that this is kind of an extreme case, but combined with a newsrc-based expire (like TMNN can do) which can expire articles when every subscriber has read them, Brad's scheme could make small Usenet sites much more manageable. Another approach, of course, is to buy a T1 link to a big site and just NNTP off of them :-), but not everyone can afford that yet... -- Amanda Walker "Tobacco is the only drug in America that will kill you if it's taken as directed." --Dr. C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General