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From: cphoenix@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Chris Phoenix)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines
Message-ID: <8280@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 25 Mar 89 08:28:57 GMT
References: <1634@ncar.ucar.edu> <3726@phri.UUCP>
Sender: cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU (Chris Phoenix)
Reply-To: cphoenix@csli.stanford.edu (Chris Phoenix)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 35

In article <3726@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>
>	I pretty much agree with Greg Woods's proposed rules.  I only have
>one comment; I think the "100 more Yes than No" rule is not strong enough.
>I don't remember exactly when the 100 threshold was thought of, but I'm sure
>the net was 1/Nth the size it is today, where N is in the interval (2,5).
>Perhaps the threshold could float, being defined as X% of the people the
>latest arbitron reports as being on the net.  I leave it to the netnews
>lawyers to hash out the details of how we determine X.  My off-the-cuff
>guess is that something on the order of 1% is probably reasonable.

I don't think this is a good idea.  As a user, I don't see most of the
net, and I don't care about most of the stuff posted, so why should the
size of the net affect whether or not a group gets created?
A group now is the same as a group several years ago, no?  If a group 
with 100 members was worthwhile back then, why should it change now?
As more people start reading the net, the percentage of readers required
to form a group will get smaller, and so there will be more groups.  On
the other hand, this hasn't killed us yet.  If groups are required to
have more readers, then they will have a higher volume, and some topics
will be squeezed together.  From what I've seen, high volume is much more
of a problem for users than fragmented topics.  (I've been forced to drop
several groups already.)
So the choice is between letting the net have more groups (annoyance for the 
administrators) and forcing the groups to gain more readers and posters
(major problems for the users).  IMHO, the users are more important. 1/2 :-)

>-- 
>Roy Smith, System Administrator
>Public Health Research Institute
>{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu
>"The connector is the network"

Chris Phoenix
cphoenix@csli.stanford.edu