Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: On newsgroup creation and naming Message-ID: <6949@ficc.uu.net> Date: 13 Nov 89 19:20:38 GMT References: <46919@looking.on.ca> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 29 Brad: there is one big problem with your article. It implies that a technological fix to the social problem would be easy: getting rid of the "B News sys file". I disagree. The problem is not the sys file... it can be made arbitrarily large with very little effort. The problem is administrative. No matter what the format of the file that controls groups, it's just too much trouble or keep track of every new group someone comes up with. I currently maintain a nearly per-group sys file at Ferranti. Each group or level gets its own line, and then it's automatically crunched for News' pleasure ... it's as easy to administer as any per-group system would be. And I'm about 3 weeks behind in updating it. It's just too much hassle to track all the groups. But you need to have some sort of explicit filtering. Your .newsrc-based filter plan sounds good, but it would lead to unintended distribution problems. This is why I suggest things like: moving the personal computer groups out of comp.sys to comp.pc, standardising the hierarchy, making the first level groups well chosen. This is why I railed against comp.soft-sys. And you're trying to put *everyone* through the same wringer? -- `-_-' Peter da Silva . 'U` -------------- +1 713 274 5180. "*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues" -- Quentin Johnson quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu