Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!berleant
From: berleant@cs.utexas.edu (Dan Berleant)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Usenet volume
Keywords: volume news
Message-ID: <4409@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 88 02:44:15 GMT
References: <1995@van-bc.UUCP> <1278@vsi1.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.utexas.edu
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 30

In article <1278@vsi1.UUCP> lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair) writes:
>In article <1995@van-bc.UUCP> sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne) writes:
>=Anybody have any statistics they can work with to give us an accurate idea
>=of the rate of increase of volume. 
>
>Many sites in the Bay Area running weekly statistics.  Last January, the
>average number of posting weekly were in the 7000-8000 range.  With the
>exception of Tahnksgiving week, the last few weeks have all been over 16,000.
>Last week saw > 17,000.  I ran partial statistics last week, as my inodes
>rapidly dwindled, and found that we received over 13,000 postings from 9am
>Tuesday through 4pm Thursday.
>
>This presents a few problems: [...]

Looks like the future may hold exponential expansion. One problem is
volume in some newsgroups. It is going to become impossible to keep
up with the news in some groups, follow discussions, etc. Some say
it already had become impossible.

Is there any chance of dynamic creation (and deletion) of newsgroups?
I have in mind that anyone can create a newsgroup for the purpose
of carrying on a discussion of a certain topic. Then, newsgroups 
that do not have any postings for some length of time will be
automatically deleted by net wide rmgroup commands (or whatever).

Is this consistent with the social structure (?) of the usenet
newsgroup system, its projected future, and is it technically
feasible?

Dan
berleant@cs.utexas.edu