Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Newsgroups: pubnet.sysops,can.usrgroup
Subject: changing USENET to suit one's system
Message-ID: <1989Nov14.041714.4650@telly.on.ca>
Date: 14 Nov 89 04:17:14 GMT
Organization: Public Access Usenet, Brampton, Ontario
Lines: 59

The whole bruhaha over the creation of sci.aquaria brought this to a
head, but it's been on my mind for a number of months:

I run a public access Usenet system, one which hopes to attract people
who are intelligent but not necessarily Unix literate. I want to
make life easier for subscribers, which means I want to make it as easy
as possible for them to find the appropriate forum for whatever they
want to discuss.

In this respect, to me, the Usenet naming hierarchy sucks. Big time.
I honestly don't think it takes a rocket scientist to come up
with something better. I could. Any of you could. And I want to.

Compounding the problem is now that this site gets news from both Usenet
and CanConfMail/SmartNet, there are conflicting newsgroup names for the
same subject from different sources (for instance, ccm.ibm.pc and
comp.sys.ibm.pc)

And maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I don't have any hesitation about
where non-controversial groups like postscript-maps should go. I trust
my instinct in these matters more than I trust anything in news.groups...

I want to develop my own newsgroup 'namespace' for use on my system.
If other sites are interested in it, God Bless, and I'll certainly
take constructive criticism and improve it. I'm even willing, (in fact,
I'd prefer,) to work on a small committee to constructively bang our
heads together to come up with an alternative to what exists.

But I refuse to subject to the bitching, flaming and massive gnashing of
teeth that goes on in news.*. I don't want to be dictated to by either
the mindless votes of those who rammed through sci.aquaria or the net.gods
who "in their wisdom" vetoed soc.sex. Both extremes have failed.

I always hear that "votes are just guidelines - every sysadmin has his
own freedom to do what he pleases." I suspect the technology is there to
let me do this without affecting my neighbours, but I'm not sure how.

Does the Usenet software currently in use allow me to re-arrange the
hierarchies *only for the purposes of reading on this site*, without
scrambling it all up for my feeds (both upstream and downstream).

As a very basic example, say my upstream feed sends me sci.aquaria. I,
not giving a damn about European distribution fights, want to have this
read on my site as rec.aquaria, but I want to pass it to my downstream
feeds in its original name.

Is this possible to implement without redoing major pieces of either the
routing or reading software?

ALSO:

Anyone like to help me work on a better hierarchy scheme, far away from
the noise of mainstream Usenet? A scheme that will acommodate large
numbers of people and multiple sources of info on any given subject?
Like a challenge? :-)
-- 
Men. They can put one on the moon. | Evan Leibovitch, Telly Computing,
Why can't they put 'em all there?  | located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
            - CBC's "Street Legal" | evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan