Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: CALL FOR LOCAL DISCUSSION: Split the c.s.a group more? Message-ID: <1990Oct24.201436.1455@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 24 Oct 90 20:14:36 GMT References: <107306@convex.convex.com> <6835@sugar.hackercorp.com> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 69 In article scot@amigash.UUCP (Scot L. Harris) writes: > Has anybody addressed the problem I saw when the games group was > added? Your perception of this problem is inaccurate. > Now the comp.sys.amiga group still gets about 400 to 600 messages a > week (and increasing....) but the games group also gets about 200 or > so messages or more a week. Zorch is _extremely_ well connected to c.s.a.games (it better be, I ran the vote to create the group), and with twelve days' postings on line, we have only 152 articles in c.s.a.games, or about 100 articles per week, not 200. > It would seem that by offically sanctioning a split the over all > number of messages have expanded dramaticly. Not really; the net as a whole is expanding dramatically, and the posting volume is tracking net growth pretty accurately. The 100 articles a week is about what we sucked out of c.s.a; it has grown despite that due to the overall growth of the net. > If you split the main group into a dozen or more sub groups are we > going to see 200 to 300 messages in each group? Postings don't arise by magic; people have to type them. With only 1/1000 of the readers actually posting to the group, there is every potential for explosive growth, yet it doesn't happen. I think it is safe to guess that the amount of time people who post are willing to spend typing articles is pretty well saturated; the advantage of doing a deep split is that by the time c.s.a.* newsgroups again get as big as c.s.a is now, the net will either have found a way to cope with larger volumes (optical storage, probably, the lines are fast enough already), or else collapsed despite anything c.s.a.* has to contribute. > Isn't this going to overwelm the net at some point? Not all by ourselves. We're a big group, but we're still under 3% of the whole. The net is busy exploring the means to support high growth rates; "we" have adopted gigabyte disks, which are now available at prices within reach of the well-to-do home hobbiest, Trailblazer technology that supports 19,200 baud transfer rates on phone lines nominally capable of 3000 or so, archive and news compression software, and so on. With fiber optic data rates and optical storage "jukeboxes" available at the commercial or lab levels, and soon on the way to the wider net, the physical storage and transfer capabilities for a larger net are well in hand. The missing component is an organization that will empower the user to cope with the larger volume. This newsgroup split is one part of that needed organization. Newer news reader technology, such as trn and nn are another part of the empowering of the USENet subscriber that needs doing. Improvements in dissemination of news software (there are still sites running Bnews 2.09, for heavens sake!) is needed , as are standards for mail addressing so that reliable email would take more posted answers to email and relieve the uninterested reader of the burden of plowing through what are essentially private conversations. Again, this split is part of the solution, not an increase in the problem, and for some sites and users, the need for the split has reached crisis levels. Your support is needed. /// It's Amiga /// for me: why Kent, the man from xanth. \\\/// settle for \XX/ anything less? -- Convener, comp.sys.amiga grand reorganization.