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From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: News Network Administration and Cleanup
Message-ID: <480@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 01:10:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: talcott.480
Posted: Mon Aug  5 01:10:48 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Aug-85 05:37:29 EDT
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 30
Xref: linus net.news:2979 net.news.group:2753

Recently, Gene Spafford (spaf@gatech) has posted messages to several
newsgroups with low traffic or very high percentages of cross postings
announcing their candidacy for removal. I do not question the accuracy
of his statistics, but I do question the consequences and conclusions
that he draws (namely the removal of the respective newsgroups).

The resources required by all low-traffic newsgroups are insignificant
when compared to the resources required by the active newsgroups (or
even a single high-volume newsgroup like net.lang.c or net.news).
Likewise, with the current news software, cross postings do not use up
any significant amount of disk space (they are simply links).

I would argue, on the other hand, that low-volume newsgroups with high
incidences of cross-postings and very specific topics are desirable
rather than unnecessary ballast.  They give readers the opportunity to
read specifically those topics that they are interested in. It might,
for example, be advantageous to split up net.lang.c into several news
groups for discussions on standards, style, &c.

Newsgroups like net.bugs.v7 and net.games.go have well defined topics
and descriptive names. It is not sensible to remove them.  Much more
important is a renaming of newsgroups like 'net*unix*' or 'net*wanted*',
a split-up of high-volume newsgroups like net.lang.c, and the creation
of newsgroups for topics which cause frequent postings to inappropriate
newsgroups due to lack of a better forum. 'Cleanup activities' like
Gene Spafford's just cause lots of unnecessary net traffic and no
conceivable gain.

					Thomas.  
					tmb@talcott