Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!rutgers!pyrnj!argon!ebh
From: ebh@argon.UUCP (Ed Horch)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The death of USENET
Summary: SSDY
Message-ID: <274@argon.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jun 88 21:19:42 GMT
References: <7475@swan.ulowell.edu> <2645@rpp386.UUCP> <56228@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: ebh@argon.UUCP (Ed Horch)
Organization: Quantum Ionics, Woodbridge, NJ
Lines: 30

In article <56228@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach):
[Summarizes how various death blows have been dealt to USENET in the
past and discusses possible volume-reduction cuts]

Wasn't the newsgroup reorganization designed to facilitate exactly
this?  I always thought that no site was ever obligated to carry any
set or subset of groups, with the lone exception being that a USENET
site was defined as anything that carried news.announce.important.

If overall volume is to be substantially reduced, I would think that
that would be best accomplished by each site reevaluating just what
traffic they want to pass.  As the megabytes of flamage regarding the
newsgroup reorganization showed, there really is no way to say that
the entire net will continue to pass {X} and permanently discontinue
passing {Y}.  For example:

Like Chuq, I can live without the binaries groups.  My opinion as
administrator and financier of this site is that the sources groups
justify the costs associated with them (e.g., this article is being
prepared using Jove).  This is a big enough network that I'm sure
there are plenty of sites whose opinion is exactly the reverse of
mine.  Even more concrete examples are the "alternative newsgroup
hierarchies", such as unix-pc.*.  I consider unix-pc a necessity, but
it is really only carried by a small minority of the entire net.

So, I guess the thesis of all this is that given that the mainstream
USENET volume has become so huge that the removal of a few or even one
backbone site starts this year's death-of-the-net panic, maybe now
it's time to start doing what the newsgroup reorganization made possible.

-Ed Horch