From: utzoo!decvax!microsof!uw-beaver!furuta
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Title: Re: Cleaning up the mess
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.533
Posted: Sun Apr 24 23:18:49 1983
Received: Wed Apr 27 05:54:40 1983
References: <502@decvax.UUCP>

I think that the approach suggested in the article "Save net.general"
is a reasonable one.  Instead of requiring that an administrator wade
through the news which is being generated at his site (we volunteer to
do this stuff, right), I would like to suggest that it be stated
strongly in the news installation documents, etc., that a site
administrator is asked to discourage inappropriate uses of the
net--this could be through following up inappropriate articles
generated by users on his system.

One problem with any schemes requiring that a site appoint an
administrator who has certain powers and responsibilites should be
apparent from current use of the net.  A certain amount of the traffic
which causes complaints is generated, apparently, by people who are
site administrators somewhere.  I refer particularly to the posting of
test messages to the wrong groups, the creation of groups which seem to
offend the net as a whole (and, in particular, the newgroup, rmgroup,
cancel control message battles which have raged in the past).  The
point here is that newsadministrators don't seem to behave noticably
different from the rest of the news readers.  Problems which exist now
will continue to exist.

The difficulty with net.general seems to be that the name "general" is,
well what else can I say than "general".  From time to time, we see
actual news articles posted to net.news.  Should it be surprising that
net.general gets articles more appropriate to net.misc?  What I suggest
is that net.general be left unchanged and a new group be formed.  The
name of the group should be sufficiently scary that people won't be
tempted to post miscellaneous garbage to it.  I suggest, perhaps,
something like net.worldwide, although that doesn't seem quite scary
enough.  Net.announcements is certainly too benign--I can envision
people posting all sorts of irrelevant stuff to that (the Rutgers
colloquium notice sounds like it might belong on this group, for
instance).  Add the new group to the default subscription list, put an
appropriately serious sounding warning message into the system,
convince Europe to take it, and see if things change.

It seems far easier to add groups to this system than to rename or
remove groups.  This ought to be kept in mind in our deliberations.

				--Rick