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From: ab3@pucc-h (Darth Wombat)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: A Modest Proposal (Apologies to J. Swift)
Message-ID: <417@pucc-h>
Date: Tue, 20-Dec-83 17:35:11 EST
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.417
Posted: Tue Dec 20 17:35:11 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Dec-83 01:11:08 EST
Organization: Purdue University Computing Center
Lines: 60


	Having observed the machinations of netnews for a while,
I'd like to make some observations and offer a couple (hopefully) 
constructive suggestions:

	1. Theorem: If a group exists, *someone* will post to it, even if 
the message is of the form "What is this newsgroup for?".  Example: net.oa.

	2. A great many of the messages in various newsgroups are duplicates.
I'm not referring to machine/news/uucp-error-generated duplicates, but 
multiple responses to single questions...such as "What is BSS?".

	3. A great many messages are so short and so unreferenced as to be
meaningless.  Example: (The entire body of a message) "What about New York?".

	4. Some people are upset about the content of messages; for example,
profanity in net.jokes.  Some people (especially Europe) are quite rightly
concerned about the vast amount of traffic transferred at non-trivial expense.
Some people are unsuscribing to newsgroups they'd rather keep because of 
nuisance traffic.  Some people are concerned about the disk space/cpu time
needed to receive, file, and send all this stuff.

	Ok, now for the suggestions:

	A. Newsgroups should expire in the same way as articles, with the
exception that certain groups should *never* expire; such as net.announce,
net.bugs.*, and other "serious" work-related newsgroups; the definition of
a work-related-serious-non-bogus-newsgroup is one that you can justify to
someone sitting upstairs who wears a three-piece suit and worries about
money and does not know what MOTOS means.

	B. Some newsgroups should be moderated; especially those which are
(1) related to work (see A above) and (2) transmitted to Europe.  This cuts
down on traffic and everyone's reading time at the expense of (1) the
moderator's time and (2) slower dissemination of information.  Certainly
this is a judgement call, but I think that if a group (say unix-wizards) is
worth so many folks' time to contribute to and read, that it is certainly
worth someone's time to moderate it.  Of course, volunteer moderators with
a judicious editorial sense must be found, but I really would not expect this
to be a problem.   Some newsgroups should be unmoderated; for example, 
net.flame.

	C. (Now for the really wild ideas.)  The next release of news should
contain a provision to create a file called, say, .newsperm (owned by "news")
in a user's home directory.  This file would allow the user to submit news,
and would be created upon successful completion of /usr/bin/newsquiz, which 
would query the user as to his/her knowledge of Usenet/Arpanet submittal 
procedures, etiquette, and so on.  An alternate implementation would use 
/usr/lib/news/who-can-submit as a central database; this would also make it
easy for local site administrators to cut off anyone who was persistently
obnoxious.

	Comments?

Rich Kulawiec
Purdue University Computing Center Unix Staff
-- 
"Go ahead...make my day."
Darth Wombat
{ allegra, decvax, ihnp4, harpo, seismo, teklabs, ucbvax } !pur-ee!rsk