Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsd!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!ncr-sd!crash!pnet01!haitex From: haitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: New Proposal for splitting up comp.sys.amiga Message-ID: <2457@crash.cts.com> Date: 31 Jan 88 08:56:07 GMT Sender: news@crash.cts.com Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA Lines: 118 NEW SUGGESTION FOR SPLITTING UP amiga/comp-amiga. --------------------------- I finally am able to read news.groups. I was expecting a raging debate as to how to or whether to split up this group. Instead I found a news group with hundreds of messages, of which only a handfull were about splitting comp.sys.amiga. I assume others have the same difficulty getting to news.groups that I've run into? (I still have not figured out how to post to it!) Well, I've put some thought into this, and this article will contain my suggestion for how to split up comp.sys.amiga. First, however, I would like to discuss what I feel to be the relevant considerations. I'll try to keep this breif. After looking at the previous suggestion to split comp.sys.amiga into two or more groups and the few responses that were posted, it seemed to me these are the issues we must consider: 1) Conservation of reading time. If comp.sys.amiga grows in proportions to the growth of the Amiga market, it is likely that there will soon be too many postings for many individuals to follow. As key people find keeping up with the net too time consuming they will, of necessity, have to stop following it. RECENTLY IT SEEMS TO ME A NUMBER OF C= PEOPLE HAVE STOP- PED REGULARLY FOLLOWING COMP.SYS.AMIGA! From the nature of the response patterns of C= messages I also think quite a few who used to read the board now respond mostly to postings referenced by someone else or which were also sent direct via mail. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE I WANT TO EN- COURAGE TO FOLLOW THE DISCUSSIONS, ESPECIALLY THE TECHNICAL POSTINGS! 2) A simple two-way split (ie: add group comp.sys.amiga.tech) would probably result in comp.sys.amiga degenerating into chatter. What reduces this now is the Flaming over non-technical threads that last too long. 3) A multi-way split is too complicated, for us and the Net GODS. Now for my solution (previously sent in a less thought out version to Bryce Nesbit {does my mail get to him??}). What I suggest is that we use the keyword field in the following manner. Reserve the keyword ".tech" for designating a technical posting. Furthermore, for future expansion, reserve the use of "." as the first character of a keyword for "sanctioned" keywords only (in the begining only ".tech"). Thus any keyword could be placed in the keywords feild that does not begin with ".". The immeadiate effect of this will be that those who must filter their reading will be able to do so. In the future however, more sanctioned keywords could be added. The keywords might be ".tech", ".intuition", ".hardware", ".graphics", ".printers", ".product_comments", etc. These would be used to create a filter to sift the postings. Ideally I might have a readnews filter defined as something like this: filter := {(!.printers) & (.graphics | .intuition)} and I would recieve only those postings which had to do with intuition or graphics but not printers. Combine with non-santioned keywords, specific articles could be filtered, as in filter := {product_comments & ASDG} would return postings about ASDG products. Finally, I would like one added feature. Filter by author sould also be available. ie: Some people's postings I always want to read, and there are a few who I never want to read. These should also be possible fields. How would you use this? Well, I figure the user creates a prioritised filter specification and also indicates the number of messages he/she wishes to read. The system would then return that number of postings, according to the filter. BEST OF ALL, THIS SYSTEM WOULD BE ALMOST TOTALLY TRANSPARENT TO THE CURRENT STRUCTURE OF COMP.SYS.AMIGA AND WOULD REQUIRE (ALMOST?) NO SUPERVISION BY THE NET GODS. Please send me E-Mail with your comments, as this is not yet an official proposal. I'm not quite sure what one does to make an official proposal. Thanks, Wade. Thank you, Wade. UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!haitex ARPA: crash!pnet01!haitex@nosc.mil INET: haitex@pnet01.CTS.COM