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From: taylor@glasgow.glasgow.UUCP (Jem Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: dave letterman -- suggesting a new group..
Message-ID: <458@glasgow.glasgow.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Mar-86 11:22:36 EST
Article-I.D.: glasgow.458
Posted: Wed Mar 19 11:22:36 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Mar-86 22:06:47 EST
References: <4547EV9@PSUVMA> <895@pucc-j>
Reply-To: taylor@glasgow.UUCP (Jem Taylor)
Organization: Comp Sci Dept, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 30

In article <895@pucc-j> rsk@pucc-j.UUCP (Wombat) writes:
>As you may or may not know, this was proposed several years ago.  It was
>eventually decided to create a mailing list, since very few people were
>actually interested in participating in this discussion.  The mailing list
>ran for a few months and died.  Based on this experience, it would seem that
>this would not be a good newsgroup to create.


Forgive me for being nai"ve, but I can't see the problem with having
thousands of groups on which no-one ever says anything. Where is the traffic?
Where is the cost ? As Brian Reid's laudable work is showing, there are
some groups which are expensive per reader. I assume these are groups on which
a lot *is* said, but few people read; similarly there are groups in which much
of the material isn't 'read' because it consists of extensive quotes from 
previous articles. Software solutions for the latter have been proposed; closing
down those groups seems like a poor solution.

What I really would like to know is 
1) why there is any reason not to create (numerous) newsgroups on a trial basis.
2) If traffic dies away on a group, why is it necessary to rmgroup it ?
3) who actually *pays* over there, state-side [ in the UK we seem to have our
funding quite well sorted out nowadays, in the Academic Community. We have a
national X.25 net in place, with no tariff on traffic, so volume is only
'costly' in CPU and disk store, not transport . The cost of transatlantic
traffic is, however, a problem - as far as I know that link has a volume tariff]

-Jem.

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