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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Re: proposed 'standard' for creating new groups
Message-ID: <891@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Mar-86 15:46:33 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.891
Posted: Thu Mar  6 15:46:33 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Mar-86 07:27:42 EST
References: <258@maynard.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 33

It would appear to me that the number of users on a site is largely
irrelevant to the issue of "voting."  That is, I see little if any reason
why a site with 30 users should actually get more voting weight than
a site with 1 or 2 users.  The key is traffic topology.  Only one copy
of any given netnews need be sent to any given site regardless of their
netnews-reading population.  And it's that traffic that is the main
issue under discussion here.  To put it another way, simply because
a site has 20 people who might want to see one group, doesn't mean
that 20 copies of that group need be sent to that site!  They need
exactly as many copies (one) as a small site.

The issue isn't really whether or not lots of people want to discuss 
a given topic.  The issue is whether or not it makes sense to use
newsgroups to handle the traffic involved in discussing such a topic.

An extreme example:

Large site foo, with 30 users who actually read netnews, and large site
bar, with another 30, see a vote request to discuss styrofoam in a proposed
new group net.foam.  As it turns out, foo and bar's people have a thing
about stryofoam, and send in 60 yes votes.  Not too many other people
care one way or another so there aren't many no votes.  Is this an
appropriate situation for creating a new newsgroup?  I think most people
would agree that it is not.  The few sites interested could pass the
material around via mail much more efficiently, and save the entire
network a great deal of expense (and possibly a lot of disk space as well). 

Of course this is an extreme case, but it serves to point out that
the number of users on a given site isn't as important as the ratio
of interested sites when it comes to the dynamics and topology involved
in newsgroup creation and traffic flow.

--Lauren--