Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!ucsd!nosc!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!amdahl!ems!pwcs!elric!hawkmoon!det
From: det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Corporate Image
Keywords: do you have one?
Message-ID: <240@hawkmoon.MN.ORG>
Date: 6 Aug 88 23:09:40 GMT
References: <7047@tness7.UUCP>
Organization: One of the Eternal Champions - Richfield, MN, 554232523, USA
Lines: 38

In article <7047@tness7.UUCP>, mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney ) writes:
> We are starting to feed news to a lot of public sites, as
> well as sites within the company. Several folks are asking the
> question, what if a VP reads the news and runs across articles
> in the explicit newsgroups, i.e. alt.sex, alt.drugs, talk.*, etc.

Hmmm, i *have* thought about that.  There is not very much support for anything
related to unix here, therefore most of the employees and especially the
management do not have an idea that such a thing as Usenet exists, much less
read it.  We also do not carry those groups which i consider offensive.  This
is more due to lack of disk space than anything else.  I figure that "others"
who may read and be offended by these groups are *not* going to attribute them
to my company.

> From a pure business standpoint, this might be construed as a
> waste of computing resources and employee time. Do you as
> a large company carry the alt groups and others?

I carry the alt.sources group -- mostly, like i said, because of a lack of disk
space more than any other reason, so far.

> Do you feel that it is a bad reflection on the image
> of your company for allowing the groups to pass to public
> and business sites?

No.  we are providing a service which some sites are grateful for.

> Do you have any advice on how to justify the existence of netnews
> on your machines, the existence of public gateway machines, the
> existence of administrative positions for news administrators, etc.

I have used at least this reason to justify Usenet:  "i personally have gotten
useful information from usenet".  Even one or two instances of this is enough
to me to justify it.
-- 
Derek Terveer		det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG
			w(612)681-6986
			h(612)688-0667