Xref: utzoo news.admin:14390 trial.newgroups:15 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!looking!brad From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: news.admin,trial.newgroups Subject: Trial Hierarchy possibly on its last legs Message-ID: <1991May17.170212.5145@looking.on.ca> Date: 17 May 91 17:02:12 GMT Organization: ClariNet Communications Corp. Lines: 70 With some sadness I must report that we have not had success with the trial hierarchy. The busiest group, trial.soc.culture.italian, recently came up for measurement, and with only 62 readers on 23% of the arbitron sites, it ranks only in the 5th percentile of USENET groups by readers/site. We had set a criterion of 25th percentile or better. It fails this test. The members are starting an old-style newsgroup vote, which they will probably pass, since it isn't hard to get 100 votes for anything with the current size of USENET. (The vote system no longer measures support, but rather opposition, in most cases.) We'll see that result at some point. There are several possible factors to consider: a) Very few people have tried trial groups. I attribute a lot of this to Gene Spafford's inclusion of a "you might not get your group anyway, even if it passes" disclaimer on the front of the trial rules. I begged him to remove it, as I think it is unfair. That disclaimer applies to all the rule systems, and in fact, applies most strongly to the 100 vote system, where if there is enough controversy about your vote, the group does not get created, or gets fragmented. Suffice to say that with such a disclaimer in front of a system, I could see why people would not use it. Thanks, Gene. b) Arbitron stats are becoming less reliable. According to them, between 25 and 50% of arbitron sites got trial groups. 25% of modern USENET is as big as all of USENET a couple of years ago. *Plenty* of sites to support any newsgroup. But a couple of the groups fizzled for lack of participation. USENET has increased an order of magnitude while the number of arbitron sites stayed constant, or even dropped. Not good. I had hoped that the trial hierarchy would encourage reporting, as people joined up to push "their" groups. I suspect trial propagation is well under 25% but how can I know? c) I could be totally wrong and people actually like the duke-it-out voting system. In my opinion, that system is getting worse. It's a lot of bureaucracy and noise, and I am not sure how well it is doing in judging groups. d) The groups we got were, no offense intended, not big dynamic winners. A couple of culture groups, a metalworking group, and a software legal issues group that has overlap with many other groups. Perhaps they were intended to fail -- perhaps they never would reach that 25th percentile if everything else were right. ------------------ Courses of action: a) Abandon the trial hierarchy b) Fix it somehow: 1) Lower the criterion perhaps to 15th percentile. (I still think 5th is too low) 2) Change the name to a set of trial hierarchies, ie. comp.trial, soc.trial, rec.trial etc. This would eliminate the propagation question since it would passive to subscribe and active to not subscribe rather than the other way around. (Not subscribing would still be the fairly simple inclusion of a !all.trial line in the sys file) Doing the above (2) would probably require holding a traditional vote, even though hierarchies are not really covered by such votes. If it would get Gene to remove that disclaimer he tacked on the rules, it would be worth it. Comments are welcome. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473