Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!eci386!jmm
From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: The disservice of pushing for sci.aquaria
Message-ID: <1989Nov22.215053.1006@eci386.uucp>
Date: 22 Nov 89 21:50:53 GMT
References: <6976@ficc.uu.net> <11566@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 43

In article <11566@cbnews.ATT.COM> wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker,00440,cb,1D211,6148604019) writes:
>In article <6976@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>>So your argument comes down to, to me, an assertion that one should
>>support sci.aquaria so people who keep fish should be able to steal
>>bandwidth. You should hope I'd overlook an argument like that.
>
>Not exactly. Rather, that people have an interest in putting their groups
>in heirarchies where they don't belong.  For the readers of alt.aquaria,
>a move to sci.aquaria would be better than one to rec.aquaria.  It was in
>their best interest to approve of this move.
>
>Peter's insistance that the proposal of sci.aquaria was some twisted,
>evil machination of Richard Sexton, without the support of the readers,
>is pure fantasy.  I'm attempting to point out the the readers had plentiful
>reason to support sci, rather than rec.

It doesn't much matter whether it was an evil twisted plot of Richard's
alone (and the aquariites were too unconcerned to fight it), or whether
a large number of the people interested in aquaria choose (in your words)
"to put their group in a hierarchy where it didn't belong".  The result
is the same: sci.aquaria has been chosen as its name in an attempt to
fraudulently increase its distribution.

Presumably some system administrators used to say "we take sci and
selected or no portions of rec".  (i.e. The ones who cause sci to have
wider distribution than rec.)  The fact that some of these now say "we
take sci, except sci.aquaria, and selected portions of rec" shows that
the fraud has to some extent failed.  These sites were not thoughtlessly
trying to make rec a backwater with bad distribution, but made a decision
that the sci groups were not worth individually pruning while the rec
groups were, now they have decided to apply individual pruning choices
to sci as well.  Quite possibly, one unanticipated result of this whole
affair has been that some *other* sci groups have lost a small amount of
their distribution - I would expect that there are probably a few (but
not many) system admins who have decided that if they had to tune the
aquaria entry for their sci feed anyhow it was about time that they
got around to killing some of the other sci groups that they had never
bothed to get rid of before.
-- 
80386 - hardware demonstrating the fractal nature of warts.   | John Macdonald
EMS/LIM - software demonstrating the fractal nature of warts. |   jmm@eci386