Xref: utzoo news.groups:33272 news.software.b:8475 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.software.b Subject: Re: Future of USENET (possibly stupid) Message-ID: <1991Jun28.002447.19000@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 28 Jun 91 00:24:47 GMT References: <80933@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Jun25.111720.17920@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <11212@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 144 sksircar@stroke.princeton.edu (Subrata Sircar) writes: > xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >> The rest of the net has only three possible >> responses when presented with a vote for an >> unfamiliar group: 1) ignore the vote; 2) vote in >> ignorance; or 3) vote NO on the "principle", >> however misguided, that there are "too many >> newsgroups". > Very few groups ever get rejected, however. The > opposite argument is more true; that the only > people who vote are the people in favor of the > split. Not quite; there are a steady 45 or so folks who vote against every group, no matter the merits, because they think the net has too many newsgroups. This means you'd better aim for 150 YES votes to pass a group, not just 100. >> 1) Index the net, so that groups of interest can >> be found by keyword searches; even a full text >> search of the entire online news spool, while >> slow as mud, would be a help in this direction. > With proper naming, this is easy; just grep the > news spool for directory names. I wish it were that easy; read a few research papers on the relative success rate of keyword searches against even full text indexed databases; the results are pretty sorry. Humans do _not_ have a good unspoken agreement about what words should be used to talk about which subjects, so you have to use lots of keywords against lots of pertinent text to have a good chance of finding what you seek. Take a look at another posting in this thread, from Richard Miller, that bemoans the difficulty of keeping conversations correctly slotted in a mere _three_ education newsgroups. Just looking at the group names isn't nearly enough, though it can of course help; I use it myself a lot, but less in looking for a subject than in finding a fully qualified group name I only remember in part. >> 3) Change the news base to a hypertext style, to >> limit the actual volume used for passing context >> material in followups. > This is unfortunately extremely difficult, given > the number of character based interfaces to the > net. How do you generate hypertext interfaces that > can be manipulated only through 7-bit ascii codes, > which is what the majority of the net uses? Up until someone got a little too clever installing facist options in inews, there was a common agreement on the net that a leading ">" (or several) indicated included material, so reserving a marker seems the right thing to do. The Thinker(tm) hypertext package encloses words which are hypertext link hotbuttons in "<", ">" pairs. Mix this with a message id, start byte, end byte contents (which need not be displayed that way to the user) and you have the essence of a hypertext link, done in printable ASCII. I'd prefer that the display to the user in the hot button show the user-id of the author of the included material, with a level number in case the thread contains quotes from that author from more than one prior article. So what the user sees would look like "" to indicate a most recent level quote from me had been included by the present article's author. We could continue the convention of keeping this left adjusted on a line alone, or tag it on the end of the previous paragraph to save space if our news displayer did real time paragraph flowing and worked in meaningful (SGML) units of text. >> 6) Create an easy to use compliment to kill >> files: interest files, such that only files that >> meet some positive criterion are presented for >> reading, rather than negative criteria being >> avoided. > This is possible with rn, I don't know about other > newsreaders. The operative word is "possible"; I use this with alt.flame to pull out napalm aimed at my personal carcass, but it is an inconvenient side effect of trn mechanisms meant for other purposes, and quite clunky. An "interest" filter designed explicitly for this purpose could be better designed. >> As an example, show me articles containing at >> least five of twenty keywords, or articles >> starting new threads. Make a global facility that >> pulls forward articles from _anywhere_ I >> subscribe, or even anywhere at all, containing >> ten of twenty particularly hot keywords, and >> presents them to me before I enter any newsgroup, >> in case that is all I have time for right now. > The first is conceptually easy; run twenty "mark" > files on the newsgroup, and only present articles > which are marked by five or more (storing the > numbers in separate files, unmarking all when > done). Thinking harder about that, what I'd probably want is "N occurrances of some subset of these M keywords with at least R differnt keywords appearing; persistent mention is a better clue than casual mention. > The second is conceptually just as easy, but > tremendously difficult in current practice. Not conceptually harder, just that our machines are nowhere near fast enough to do the job; a Connection Machine wired into the disk drive hardware would be Just About Right. >> Naturally typing one of these behemoths in rn or >> trn to jump directly to the newsgroup is a royal >> pain. > This can be done with filename completion, as > t-shell editing or Mach on the NeXT provide; > simply type part of the name and hit a hot key and > it finishes unique extensions. Yeah, except that hierarchy names by design aren't unique until you get close to the end. Doing completion a level at a time would be better, but a point and click interface would be _much_ better. Kent, the man from xanth.