From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!alice!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: Re: Getting tired of the fate of net.general
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3455
Posted: Sat Apr 23 21:56:05 1983
Received: Mon Apr 25 19:09:32 1983
References: <4338@cornell.UUCP>

Notesfiles won't solve the problem.  Even if notesfiles were
being supported and maintained, and even if it were shown to
work in a 500 machine environment, the problem is not too
many followups in net.general.  The problem is simply too
many diverse, inconsequential topics.  Look at what's been
posted there recently.  No person could possibly be interested
in what's there enough to want to read it.  For Pete's sake,
the entire continent of Europe has decided that there is nothing
of value in that newsgroup!  We currently have no way of
reaching the entire network - the newsgroup that was created
for exactly that has been so polluted that it has been shut
off!  They have the option of running notesfiles if they want.
Some sites over there probably do.  It obviously doesn't help.

"It is not yet the case that there is an overwhelming number of
topics under discussion."  Obviously it is, if you are among
the many people who have turned off net.general.  Such people
do not have time for such babble.  Such people aren't even reading
this, because they dropped out long ago.  Some of us have much
higher tolerance than most; we are the only one left reading
net.general.

"If the regular software were able to at least include the relationship
between articles and followups".  You must be running a 1980
vintage of netnews at Cornell - there has been a "References"
line for a long time in news headers, indicating followups.
Notesfiles could use it, but without support, notesfiles hasn't
been taught about it.  And of course, there are people like you,
Hal Perkins, who do not bother to use the followup mechanism,
but just post a fresh article.  Neither news nor notes is able
to figure out what you are following up, since you skirted the
mechanism.  You aren't alone in doing this.

"the news programs should make at least a minimal effort to present
articles in a rational order.  .. since UUCP appears to ship short
articles before long ones, it is common to have a followup to an
article appear before the article".  You ought to at least check
out your facts before rambling.  UUCP ships in directory order,
which is usually the order of presentation, but sometimes random.
Berknets ship shortest job first, but they don't account for
much of Usenet.  In fact, B news goes to great pains to present
the articles by newsgroup.  They should be further sorted, and
someday they will be.  That will help net.misc a lot.  It will bring
it down to the point where net.misc is no worse than net.general is
today.  And all the time stamp information is present in news
headers, and has been for years.

"the software should be fixed so that duplicate articles are
displayed only once".  This fix has been there for over a year.
But if Cornell runs ancient software, of course they won't have
the fix.  And nothing helps if people insist in POSTING the
article more than once (except the human moderator I'm suggesting)
which they often seem to do.