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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxi!mhuxj!mhuxl!achilles!ulysses!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: net.gay
Message-ID: <315@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Sep-83 15:12:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.315
Posted: Thu Sep 15 15:12:50 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Sep-83 17:32:06 EDT
References: <135@denelcor.UUCP>, <18656@wivax.UUCP>, <1050@utcsstat.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 34

I am worried about some organizations finding something like net.gay
sitting around on their machine or network and deciding that it is
misuse of their resources.  (In particular, I seem to recall this
almost happened on the ARPANET a while back - Lauren Weinstein has
told the story several times and perhaps it's time to repeat it.)
The potential might be that someone in power who doesn't understand
Usenet might find out about it, look more closely at Usenet, decide
he doesn't like the rest of the stuff on Usenet, and cause lots of
trouble.

I'm not saying that net.gay shouldn't exist.  I do strongly suggest that
the founders of the newsgroup make sure there is really a reasonably large
group of gays (or people interested in gay issues) on the net to justify
this - if not it's probably not worth it.

I suspect we want to make it easy for a particular site that is paranoid
to refuse to accept/forward this newsgroup.  I also request that all sites
that think they would probably have to refuse this newsgroup please either
post a note saying so or mail me a note - I'll post a count and say whether
any of them are backbone sites.  (I would encourage backbone sites to
carry everything, including net.gay.)

Frankly, I hope we are all mature enough to tolerate such a newsgroup
without getting defensive.  There are already several other equally
unusual newsgroups out there, doing just fine.

If the people behind it decide that a moderated newsgroup is needed,
the reasonable choices of names would be mod.gay or net.mod.gay -
the former would only work if mod.all were created.

Here's another thought - suppose everything on this newsgroup were
required to be rotated ala net.jokes?

	Mark Horton