Asri-unix.152
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure
Mon Nov 30 17:15:13 1981
many small lists
I like the idea of many lists dealing with specific subjects, but
I don't think the current netnews program is well suited to handling
this. It should operate in reverse to how it does now. By this I mean
that there would be a command to show you all the lists your site subscribes
to and then a mechanism whereby you could subscribe. Now, you get everything
when you run netnews for the first time, and it takes forever to plow
through it all. Also, I think that it should be handled more like messge
sequences in MM and HERMES on TOPS-20/TENEX, where a group of messages
are available, upon which you can perform numerous operations (the
mail program is not a terribly good attempt at this). Also, netnews
should act like a normal message program, showing headers and so forth.
The current way, forking up some random Berkeley program on it, is 
dubious at best.

In other words, people should not have to trim infinity to a few lists.
Rather, they should get nothing (other than net.general and net.news
perhaps) and be required to add themselves to any lists they want to
be on. This would avoid the problem of people being plagued whenever
new lists are added and having to plow through it all.