Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: FSFnet, Otherrealms, and other electronic magazines...
Message-ID: <37044@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 6 Dec 89 17:43:34 GMT
References: <1989Dec6.100342.5982@sssab.se>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 48

matoh@sssab.se (Mats Ohrman) writes:
>aem@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (a.e.mossberg) writes:

>Which means Otherrealms is the first to go, as it is quarterly. 
>[ Hey, Chuq, are you listening to this? ]

Listening and giggling. Mossberg is more than welcome to kick OtherRealms
off the net if he wants, but he's the one that'll have to explain it to my
11,000 (arbitron) readers, and to the uucp sites that are going to get
inundated when they convert over to uucp feeds.

Seriously, this sort of thing comes up every so often. It can generally be
more or less ignored.

Not all groups have high volume. One of the primary reasons for moderated
groups (and for electronic magazines, which are effectively hyper-moderated)
is to keep the noise level down. This kind of proposal is silly, because by
lumping a bunch of unrelated postings into the same newsgroup, you
effectively turn the noise level back up again, defeating the initial purpose.

As long as the group is being used for what it was intended and is still
active, it doesn't matter whether it's one posting a month or one posting a
year. Leave it alone. The whole purpose of rec.mag.otherrealms is to keep
the noise down as close to zero as possible. So far, I think it's done that
quite well.

My position is real simple on r.m.o and is the same as it has always been.
When the net decides that it's time to delete r.m.o, I'll stop distributing
OtherRealms on the net. If a site doesn't want to carry the group, that's
great -- it's their choice. But OtherRealms won't live in rec.mag, or
rec.mag.sfer, or rec.arts.sf-lovers. It's its own entity, and will stay
that way.

Why don't we find some important issue to argue over? USENET seems to love
spending inordinate amount of time arguing trivialities while ignoring
serious problems completely.



-- 

Chuq Von Rospach   <+>   chuq@apple.com   <+>   [This is myself speaking]

When it comes to matters ourside your specialties, you are consistently and
brilliantly stupid [....] with respect to matters you haven't studied and
have had no experience basing your opinions on casual gossip [....] and
plain misinformation -- unsuspected because you haven't attempted to verify it.
	-- Robert Heinlein to J.W. Campbell, Jr. 1941