Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!uunet!inmet!justin
From: justin@inmet.inmet.com
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Give it up, folks (backbone cab
Message-ID: <41800008@inmet>
Date: 16 Nov 89 21:25:00 GMT
References: <6921@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Lines: 34
Nf-ID: #R:pt.cs.cmu.edu:6921:inmet:41800008:000:1718
Nf-From: inmet.inmet.com!justin    Nov 16 16:25:00 1989


Re: Brad's idea about "levels" of groups

Hear, hear! I've been muddling around with this idea for the better part
of a year now, never quite getting up the guts to actually post it (largely
because it would require some changes to the software to work well, and I'm
pretty cynical about the chances of that happening). But my ideas jibe
almost exactly with Brad's. A possible structure:

Hierarchies
"Top-level" groups, created by some sort of Net consensus
"Subgroups", creatable more easily. (By any sysadmin? I'd like to believe
  that most sysadmins understand what they're doing well enough that they
  wouldn't do anything stupid, but experience tells me that that may not
  be the case).
"Topics", startable by any user
"Subtopics", any number of levels, startable by any user

One should have the ability to kill any topic easily (not hard to implement),
as well as the capability of subscribing *only* to a topic without 
subscribing to the entire group. (Note that this could eliminate the need
for cross-posting as it now exists. Instead of x-posting the whole thread,
one would just x-post a message saying, "this discussion is starting up in
this newsgroup, under this topic", with some sort of hook that would allow
users to easily join the topic.) All of this would apply equally to sub-topics,
so that a reader could kill a tangent thread easily.

Sigh; the last time I started in on this idea, I got 15 pages into it, before
giving up, saying, "Nahh, it'll never happen". What do people think? Is it
worth pursuing ideas of how to make a better Net structure, or is it just
an exercize in futility? Should I pull out all of those old notes, or just
let them moulder in peace?

				-- Justin du Coeur