Xref: utzoo news.admin:14834 news.groups:32547 comp.groupware:585
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Reform Trial.* (was: Trial flawed)
Keywords: group creation votes preference
Message-ID: <1991Jun01.041929.8253@looking.on.ca>
Date: 1 Jun 91 04:19:29 GMT
References: <1991May30.144345.15890@gorm.ruc.dk> <1991May31.022710.11297@looking.on.ca> <1991May31.192813.28009@gorm.ruc.dk>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 33

In article <1991May31.192813.28009@gorm.ruc.dk> david@gorm.ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) writes:
>>It is not efficient in human or machine resources for a discussion group
>>of 100 people to have a discussion distributed to 20,000 machines.  In the
>
>Support this statement - if you can.

I hope the question of machine resources doesn't need support.  However
it ties to human resources.  A very large number of sites no longer get
all groups.  Even sites that get all groups tend to, under human control,
treat them differently with different expire times, or different feedings
to downstream sites.

The more groups a machine gets the shorter the expire time has to be for
a given size disk.   This is a machine resource that affects humans.  If
a group has 100 readers and 10,000 sites, then a vast number of sites
either have to remove the group manually or reduce the expire time (eventually)
on the whole thing, or buy more disks.  All are human efforts.  Reduce
expire times also affect the people reading the groups you want.

There are some machines which USENET does not impinge on, but for most of
us with limitations on disk and phone time, every new group costs.

Of course, I have done something about that, and on my own machine, I am
fed exactly the set of current groups being read on my own site and
downstream sites, and this is done without human intervention.  This is what
I belive the long term solution to be.

However, until everybody uses a dynamic feeding scheme of some sort, and as
long as usenet grows to fill the disk space available, it will continue to
be inefficient in the extreme to have a group of 100 people distributed to
10,000 or 20,000 machines.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473